The other three candidates, who did not openly challenge Putin, received 4.31%, 3.85%, and 3.20% respectively.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was reelected for his fifth term with 87.28% of the votes, the electoral commission announced on Monday after the scrutiny of all polling stations in the country.
The other three candidates, who did not openly challenge Putin, received 4.31%, 3.85%, and 3.20% respectively, according to this result, which does not include votes from abroad, clarified the electoral commission.
The results were rejected by the international community, which denounced the events in Russia between Friday and Sunday as an “electoral farce,” the culmination of a democratic degradation process that has been ongoing for years and has manifested in multiple ways, including the persecution and death in prison of Alexei Navalny, Putin’s main opponent in the last 20 years.
The Kremlin announced that Russians turned out to vote in an unprecedented number: the turnout was 74% of eligible voters. Putin’s previous highest result occurred in 2018 when he purportedly obtained 76.7% of the votes with a turnout of 67.5%.
Among the regions that voted are those occupied in Ukraine during 2014 and after the invasion of 2022: Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea.
Putin faced no real rivals because judicial authorities excluded two candidates who had expressed opposition to the war in Ukraine, while the three who were allowed to run did not directly challenge Putin’s authority.
On Monday, a festival is planned in Moscow’s Red Square to celebrate the result, coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014, the beginning of Moscow’s military assault on Kiev, which culminated in the launch of the offensive on February 24, 2022.
In his speech, Putin congratulated himself on the “internal political consolidation,” two years after the offensive against Ukraine and Western sanctions against the country.
“No matter who or how much they want to intimidate us, no matter who or how much they want to crush us,” he said. “It hasn’t worked now, and it won’t work in the future. Never.”
Throughout the week, there were bombings and incursions by Ukrainian militants on Russian soil.
Putin, who can run again in 2030 and remain in power until 2036, paid tribute to the soldiers fighting in Ukraine and protecting “Russia’s historic territories.”
In his view, Russian forces, since taking control of Avdiivka in mid-February, have “the entire initiative” on the front.
However, the opposition managed to show itself symbolically, responding to the call of Navalny’s widow. Yulia Navalnaya, who promised to continue her husband’s cause, urged her followers to vote on Sunday at noon.
Navalnaya voted at the Russian embassy in Berlin, where she lives in exile with her children.
