Moscow, Mar 15 (EFE).- Russians started voting Friday on the first day of the eighth presidential elections in its history in which the current head of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, is expected to cruise to a fifth six-year term.
Polling stations opened Thursday night in the Kamchatka Peninsula and in the Chukotka Autonomous area, the easternmost regions of Russia, for an election in which more than 112 million Russians are expected to cast their votes over the next three days.
The polls opened at 8 am local time (20:00 GMT) in the Russian Far East and will close at 8 pm local time (18:00 GMT) in the Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad in a country with 11 time zones.
Russians will be able to exercise their right to vote for 36 hours, with more than 2 million people having voted in advance.
According to official polls, Putin, who is competing against three other candidates and whose government holds a tight grip on politics and the media, has more than 80 percent support, so could achieve his largest electoral victory since he came to power in 2000.
The representative of the New People party, Vladislav Davankov, and the Communist Party’s Nikolai Kharitonov have 6 percent support, while the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party’s Leonid Slutski has around 5 percent support.
According to the Central Election Commission (CEC), the elections will take place in all 89 regions of the country, including the four Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia since 2022 (Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia), and the illegally annexed Crimea.
Some 4.5 million people will be able to vote in the areas occupied by the Russian army in the four territories partially controlled by Moscow.
In total, the commission enabled 93,644 polling stations, and another 295 in 144 countries where Russian citizens live.
More than a third of voters will be able to exercise their right to vote electronically, a clearly fraudulent method, according to the opposition in exile.
Following the death in prison of prominent opposition leader Alexei Navalny, his supporters – who hold Putin directly responsible – called on the West not to recognize the electoral results.
Ukraine, which considers the Russian elections on its territory illegal, has launched several massive drone attacks against Russia in recent days, in addition to border incursions in the Belgorod and Kursk regions.
The first presidential election in Russian history took place on June 12, 1991, under the Soviet Union, and won by Boris Yeltsin, who was re-elected in 1996 and who handed over power to Putin in 1999. EFE
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