High noon for Putin: Opposition trolls Russia’s rigged election

Russia’s opposition is working morning, noon and night to give President Vladimir Putin a bloody nose in this weekend’s rigged election.

While Putin is certain to win — the only intrigue is whether he’ll surpass his own personal vote share record (77 percent in 2018) — campaigners linked to the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny aren’t going down without a fight.

Pay particular attention to Russia at midday on Sunday.

Opposition figures have organized mass participation of voters at polling stations at 12 p.m. local time in each region across the country. The initiative, dubbed “Noon Against Putin,” aims to showcase popular revulsion at Putin’s longtime reign over Russia.

While Navalny’s death in an Arctic prison last month extinguished the Kremlin’s most prominent opponent and his allies in exile are phlegmatic what their protest can realistically achieve, they have a clear message to Putin: We don’t want you. And neither do millions of Russians.

While the final numbers will almost certainly be cooked up, the big idea of the 12 o’clock rush is to have physical — and filmable — evidence that there is a meaningful opposition to Putin.

“Clearly, the ‘Noon Against Putin’ action will not lead to the immediate downfall of the regime. Rather, it is an attempt to show how many people in Russia express anti-war and anti-Putin views,” Lyubov Sobol, a Russian politician in exile, told POLITICO.

Putin, first elected president in 2000, has spent years tightening his grip over Russian society and clamping down on any form of dissent against his rule. Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was the catalyst for increased domestic repression, and the once-thriving opposition movement led by Navalny has been quashed.

Putin’s celebratory concert is already planned for Moscow’s behemoth Luzhniki Stadium on Monday, and his own press secretary revealed last year that the president “will be reelected next year with more than 90 percent of the vote” because Russia’s presidential election “is not really democracy, it is costly bureaucracy.”

Even though the noon protest is likely to be symbolic at best, that hasn’t stopped control-freak Russian authorities from cracking down and looking to undermine it.

The state has already pressured public sector employees to vote on Friday, and it has organized counterfeit celebrations and public events for noon on Sunday in some city centers to clash with the protest.

On Wednesday, a significant disinformation campaign began, with many Russian opposition activists receiving messages via email, Telegram and Signal falsely claiming the noon action was “postponed,” which was promptly refuted by Navalny’s team.

A more ominous warning arrived Thursday evening, with the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office warning people off coming to polling stations on Sunday at noon, threatening “criminal liability” as “these illegal actions may impede the free exercise by citizens of their electoral rights and the work of election commissions.”

Ingenious plan

Noon Against Putin was the brainchild of St. Petersburg politician Maxim Reznik and it gained support from Navalny and his team, uniting fragmented opposition groups, from left to right, behind the initiative.

The opposition knows it’s not perfect, but with the chances of a large-scale rebellion against Putin almost at nil, it’s better than nothing.

“Holding any public protests in Russia is impossible. They immediately become a pretext for arrest,” Fyodor Krasheninnikov, an independent Russian political analyst, told POLITICO. “That’s why people enthusiastically participate in events that, while not formally protests, are effectively acts of protest. Thus, Noon Against Putin should be viewed as a protest action.”

The campaign is, in many ways, an ingenious plan. Voters are still turning up to the polling stations and that is one of very few political rights still available for Russians as Putin, at least theoretically, also needs people to cast their ballots for him. Once in the voting booths, protesters can vote for another candidate or spoil their ballot.

On Thursday, Navalny’s team published his last letter from prison. 

“No matter how often I say it doesn’t matter, mathematically or politically, whom you vote for, you still find yourself in the voting booth with a pen hovering over the ballot. Eventually, you must decide where to place your mark,” Navalny’s final message read.

The Noon Against Putin campaign’s core strategy is extremely active online, with information being spread through social media and YouTube channels belonging to opposition groups.

Additionally, a traditional political campaign, led by the political department of Navalny’s team under Leonid Volkov, has seen participation from some 14,000 individuals both in Russia and abroad, raising around €240,000.

Volkov was attacked in Vilnius on Tuesday by an assailant wielding a hammer, which Lithuanian authorities have described as “political terrorism” directed by Russia.

But the opposition movement is undaunted.

“This attack will not stop the work. Rather, on the contrary, it will give anger and motivation. After all, attacks and brutality are the flip side of Vladimir Putin’s cowardice,” Sobol said.

Volunteers in Russia discreetly distribute printed campaign materials, while those abroad operate a call center, contacting Russians by phone and disseminating materials through social networks.

“I think it will be a success if the action covers the majority of polling stations across Russia and if it takes place not only in large cities with millions of people, but also in villages and hamlets in areas remote from Moscow,” Sobol added.

“I rate the prospects highly and I think the campaign will be a success.”

Denis Leven is hosted at POLITICO under the EU-funded EU4FreeMedia residency program.