15 March 2024 , 13:25
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Voters in Russia are heading to the polls for a three-day election - but face a grim choice between Vladimir Putin and 'puppet' opposition parties.
The Presidential vote began on Friday and will last through to Sunday, so ballots can be cast across the vast country's 11 time zones.
Polling stations have also been opened in illegally annexed regions of Ukraine.
Russians can also vote online for the first time in a presidential contest, and authorities claimed more than 200,000 people in Moscow voted via the internet soon after the polls opened.
But the eventual results are very unlikely to come with any surprises as Mr Putin, 71, is running for his fifth term virtually unchallenged.
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Vladimir Putin, 71, is running for his fifth term virtually unchallenged (Zuma Press/PA Images)His real political opponents are either in jail or in exile abroad, while Alexei Navalny died in a remote Arctic penal colony last month. The three other candidates on the ballot are low-profile politicians from token opposition parties, which are directly controlled by Kremlin political operatives.
Very few, if any, independent observers will be allowed at the polling stations, and Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg said earlier week that the ballot "will not be free and fair". Explaining how Putin will dominate the process, Sam Greene, director for Democratic Resilience at the Centre for European Policy Analysis in Washington meanwhile said: "The elections in Russia as a whole are a sham. The Kremlin controls who's on the ballot. The Kremlin controls how they can campaign. To say nothing of being able to control every aspect of the voting and the vote-counting process,"
Ukraine and the West have also condemned Russia for holding the vote in Ukrainian regions that Moscow's forces have seized and occupied. The Kremlin banned two politicians from the ballot who sought to run on an anti-war agenda, while Putin's political campaigning - which have been barely distinguishable from his regular presidential appearances - have pandered to suspicions of the West held by large sections of the Russian population. A number of Kremlin officials, including some wearing jumpers with the words 'Putin's Team', have spoke openly of a war with NATO.
Grigory Melkonyants, who heads Russia's renowned independent election observer group Golos, is in jail awaiting trial on charges widely seen as an attempt to silence the group ahead of the election. He said in a recent report: "The current elections will not be able to reflect the real mood of the people. The distance between citizens and decision-making about the fate of the country has become greater than ever."