As expected, Russian President Vladimir Putin has won his fifth term in office, following a campaign in which all his significant rivals were barred from running, imprisoned, or dead.
Voting started Friday and concluded Sunday. Putin won the contest with over 87 percent of the vote, with a reported 77 percent turnout. The record post-Soviet win was Putin’s choreographed attempt to demonstrate his popularity — and that of the war in Ukraine. But it is impossible to take much away, given the level of repression in Russian society and Putin’s ambition to make himself synonymous with the Russian state.
The results come just a month after the death of Putin’s most potent and vocal foe, the anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny, while he was serving a 19-year sentence in an Arctic penal colony on multiple charges including extremism. It’s also a little over two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which Russia refers to as a “special military operation.” Western countries have backed Ukraine during the grueling two-year war and imposed heavy sanctions on Russia, but those efforts have done little to loosen Putin’s grip on power; on the contrary, Putin’s government is at its most repressive since he first took power in 2000.
Even before his fifth term starts, Putin will already be the longest-serving Russian leader since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. If he serves out the entirety of this six-year term, he will surpass Stalin and be in the running next with Catherine the Great and then perhaps eventually Peter the Great — two rulers whose imperial power Putin has sought to mimic in his conquest of Ukraine and other former Soviet and imperial lands.
With his reelection, Putin will be in power till at least 2030, unless he dies or is somehow removed from power in the intervening six years.
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