Russian ballot boxes vandalised as presidential election starts

AFP | Moscow   

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

The first day of voting in Russia’s presidential election was marred by acts of vandalism at polling stations yesterday, with at least nine arrests for pouring dye into ballot boxes and arson attacks.

Vladimir Putin is set to secure another six years in the Kremlin after a three-day vote he has cast as a show of Russians’ loyalty and support for his military assault on Ukraine, now in its third year.

Despite authorities warning that election-day protesters faced heavy punishment, at least nine were arrested for acts of vandalism at polling stations.

In Moscow, video showed a woman setting a voting booth alight, filling a polling station with smoke, while another showed a woman pouring green dye into a ballot box. Four others in the Russian regions of Voronezh, Karachay-Cherkessia and Rostov were detained for similar offences, while in Saint Petersburg and the Siberian region of Khanty-Mansi, women were detained for throwing Molotov cocktails at polling stations.

A man was detained for lighting fireworks inside a polling station in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk, while in Russian-occupied southern Ukraine, an explosive device was detonated at a voting site.

Close to the border with Ukraine, a wave of Ukrainian drone and artillery strikes killed two people in the Belgorod region. Russia also launched one of its deadliest missile attacks of the conflict, killing at least 14 in a strike on the Black Sea port city of Odesa.

The strikes cap one the heaviest weeks of aerial attacks since the start of conflict and come after a week of cross-border raids by pro-Kyiv guerilla fighters, bringing Putin’s two-year conflict into Russian territory once again.

In power as president or prime minister since the final day of 1999, victory in the three-day vote would allow Putin to stay in power until 2030 -- longer than any Russian leader since Catherine the Great in the 18th century.

On the eve of the vote, Putin urged Russians to back him in the face of a “difficult period” for the country. “We have already shown that we can be together, defending the freedom, sovereignty and security of Russia ... Today it is critically important not to stray from this path,” he said Thursday on state TV.

The Kremlin leader’s confidence is riding high. His troops have secured their first territorial gains in Ukraine in nearly a year and his most strident opponent of the last decade, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic prison colony last month. In Moscow, a few dozen residents queued in the morning sun to be among the first in the capital to cast their ballots.

“It’s important to vote, for Russia’s future,” said 70-year-old Lyudmila. She backed Putin and was hoping for “above all, victory” in Ukraine, she said. Another Putin voter, Natan, 72, said he wanted the government to “increase employment, work to ensure that there is no war, stability in the country”. Voting was also being organised in occupied parts of eastern Ukraine that Russia claims to have annexed.