Russia began voting on Friday in an election set to prolong President Vladimir Putin’s rule by six more years, as Kyiv branded the vote a “farce” and launched a barrage of deadly attacks on border regions.
Officials in Moscow warned against any protests during the March 15-17 presidential vote, after calls from the opposition for anti-Putin demonstrations on Sunday.
The Kremlin says the vote will show that the country is fully behind its assault on Ukraine and polling stations have been set up in Russian-held territories.
Ahead of the election, Kyiv ramped up its aerial bombardment of Russian regions just across their shared border.
And the Russian National Guard said it was fighting off attacks from pro-Ukrainian militias in Kursk, the latest in a string of border clashes.
“I am convinced: you realize what a difficult period our country is going through, what complex challenges we are facing in almost all areas,” Putin said in an address to Russians on the eve of the vote.
“And in order to continue to respond to them with dignity and successfully overcome difficulties, we need to continue to be united and self-confident.”
Polling stations opened in Russia’s easternmost Kamchatka peninsula at 8:00 a.m. local time on Friday and are set to close at 8:00 p.m. on Sunday in Kaliningrad — a Russian exclave bordering Poland and Lithuania.
‘Border clashes’
All of Putin’s major critics are dead, in prison or in exile, and authorities blocked the few genuine competitors who tried to stand in the contest.
Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most high-profile opponent over the last decade, died in February in an Arctic prison colony. He was serving 19 years for “extremism,” a sentence widely seen as retribution for his campaigning against the Kremlin leader.
