Vote to cement Putin’s rule amid Ukraine attacks, Navalny protests

TDT | Moscow       

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

Russians voted yesterday on the final day of an election to extend Vladimir Putin’s rule to three decades, as Ukraine launched fatal attacks on the border and some voters crowded outside polling stations in protest.

The three-day vote had already been marked by a surge in fatal Ukrainian bombardments, incursions into Russian territory by pro-Kyiv sabotage groups and vandalism at polling stations. The Kremlin has cast the election as an opportunity for Russians to throw their weight behind its full-scale military operation in Ukraine, where voting is also being staged in Russian-controlled territories.

Ukraine has slammed the ballot as illegitimate and urged the international community to reject Putin’s inevitable new six-year mandate. Supporters of the late Alexei Navalny -- Putin’s most prominent rival, who died in an Arctic prison last month -- urged voters to pour into polling stations at noon and spoil their ballots for a “Midday Against Putin” protest.

His wife, Yulia Navalnaya was greeted by supporters with flowers and applause when she joined a long queue of voters at the Russian embassy in Berlin. Some voters in Moscow appeared to heed Navalny’s call, telling AFP they had come to honour his memory and show their opposition in the only legal way possible.

‘Russia is not Putin’

“I came to show that there are many of us, that we exist, that we are not some insignificant minority,” said 19-year-old student Artem Minasyan at a polling station in central Moscow. Leonid Volkov, a senior aide to the late opposition leader and who was recently attacked in Lithuania where he fled political persecution in Russia, thanked Russians for joining the noon protest.

“You saw each other. The whole world saw you. Russia is not Putin. Russia is you,” he wrote on social media. But other voters expressed their support for Putin, saying that casting their ballots for him was the only way to guarantee peace. “What we want today, first of all, is peace,” said 70-year-old pensioner Lyubov Pyankova.

She was standing in front of a polling station in Putin’s native city of Saint Petersburg decorated with the red, white and blue ‘V’ logo -- a symbol associated with the military offensive -- that Moscow has also used to promote the vote. Russia simply wanted “not to be disturbed, not to be told what to do”, Pyankova said.