Pyotr, 41, a advertising specialist in Moscow, expressed pleasure that Mr. Putin may outwit and outlast Western adversaries. “Towards the background of those under-presidents, the Macrons and so forth,” he mentioned, referring to President Emmanuel Macron of France, Mr. Putin “appears like such a celestial being.”
The opposite three candidates on the presidential poll had been all members of the State Duma, Russia’s rubber-stamp Parliament, and had voted for the struggle in Ukraine, for elevated censorship and for legal guidelines curbing homosexual rights.
With Mr. Putin’s best-known critics in jail or in exile, one little-known opponent of the struggle, Boris B. Nadezhdin, did handle to gather tens of 1000’s of signatures in an try and get on the poll. However the authorities invalidated sufficient of the signatures final month to bar him, citing what it referred to as “irregularities.”
Nonetheless, Russia’s embattled and largely exiled opposition managed to make use of the elections to mount an uncommon protest: Putin opponents had been inspired to line up at their polling station at midday native time on Sunday. Whereas it was laborious to evaluate what number of voters selected that point to precise their discontent, one polling station close to Moscow’s famed Tretyakov Gallery was comparatively quiet earlier than a protracted line fashioned abruptly at midday.