Kremlin signals Vladimir Putin will claim landslide Russian election victory

The Kremlin has signalled that Vladimir Putin will claim a landslide victory in Russia’s presidential vote, as thousands in the country and around the world protested against his deepening dictatorship, the war in Ukraine and a stage-managed election that could have only one winner.

Putin won 87% of the vote, according to exit polling published by the state-run pollsters Russian Public Opinion Research Center and the Public Opinion Foundation. After counting 26.74% of the votes, Russia’s electoral commission claimed Putin was leading with 88% of the vote. In second place was the Communist party candidate Nikolai Kharitonov.

The government also claimed turnout was the highest in history at 74% of the electorate. Putin’s highest previous results came in 2018, when he purported to earn 76,69% of the vote with a 67.50% turnout.

As Putin seeks a public mandate for his war in Ukraine and fifth presidential term, the Kremlin’s electoral machine sought to boost his share of the vote and turnout to near farcical levels, posting results that used to only appear in Russia’s most despotic regions such as Chechnya.

In the face of Putin’s predictable victory, Russia’s embattled opposition sought to put together its own show of strength. Long queues formed at several polling stations in Moscow and other Russian cities as people took up a call from the widow of the president’s most prominent opponent, Alexei Navalny, to head to the polls at noon on Sunday. Yulia Navalnaya urged her supporters to appear en masse in the symbolic show of strength, labelled “noon against Putin”. Her husband endorsed the plan before he died suddenly in an Arctic prison a month ago.

Among the participants was Yulia herself, who was greeted with huge applause and chants from voters and thanked people for turning up to honour her husband.

Navalny’s team called on voters to spoil their ballot papers, write “Alexei Navalny” across the voting slip or vote for one of the three candidates standing against Putin, though the opposition regards them as Kremlin “puppets”.

Reports from the ground suggested queues suddenly formed at numerous polling stations across Russia’s big cities as the clock struck midday.

“At 11.55, there was no line at all. At 12.01 there was already a line of about 80 people,” Mediazona, an independent Russian outlet, reported from a polling station in the north-east of Moscow.

Fontanka, a St Petersburg-based outlet, published footage of a long queue forming at a polling station on Nevsky Prospekt, the principal avenue in the centre of Russia’s second biggest city.

Leonid Volkov, a Navalny aide who was attacked by an unknown assailant with a hammer in Vilnius last week, said several thousand queues had formed at midday at polling stations across the country.

Ruslan Shaveddinov of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation said: “We showed ourselves, all of Russia and the whole world that Putin is not Russia, that Putin has seized power in Russia.”

There was no independent tally of how many of Russia’s 114 million voters turned out at noon to show opposition to Putin, and many polling stations did not report an increase in the flow of voters.

Still, the long queues at some stations will be seen by many as a rare display of dissent at a time of unprecedented repression in the country.

Independent Russian media outlets also published images of spoiled ballots posted by voters, with “killer and thief” inscribed on some as well as the name “Navalny”.

Sunday was the final day of a presidential election that is guaranteed to cement Putin’s hardline 24-year rule until at least 2030. Putin will celebrate the final results, which will be announced late on Sunday, at a concert tomorrow at the Luzhniki stadium set to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.

En route to his win, Russia also disqualified anti-war candidates, launched an unparalleled get-out-the-vote campaign targeted at state workers, and spent more than £1bn on a propaganda drive, according to leaked documents shared with the Guardian.

The Russian leader has faced no meaningful contest after the authorities barred two candidates who had voiced their opposition to the war in Ukraine. Three other politicians running in the election do not directly question Putin’s authority and their participation was meant to add an air of legitimacy to the race.

Long queues also formed at noon in places popular among Russian émigrés such as Berlin, Yerevan in Armenia, London and the Thai island of Phuket. Hundreds of thousands of Russians are estimated to have left their country since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago.

“This action was Navalnly’s last wish, we just had to come today at noon,” said Dmitry, a Russian voter who moved to Phuket shortly after the start of the war in Ukraine, who asked for his last name to be withheld for fear of repercussions.

The German Deutsche Welle outlet estimated more than 2,000 voters turned up for the midday protest outside the Russian embassy in Berlin.

Russian prosecutors had on Friday threatened any voters who took part in the noon against Putin action with five years in prison. In the southern city of Kazan, police detained more than 20 voters who had joined the protest, according to the independent rights monitor OVD-Info. Arrests were also reported in Moscow and St Petersburg.

Individual acts of protest including pouring dye into ballot boxes and arson attacks at polling stations had already taken place before Sunday.

Ella Pamfilova, Russia’s election commissioner, said those who spoiled ballots were “bastards”, and the former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said those responsible could face treason sentences of 20 years.

Putin has won previous elections by a landslide, but independent election watchdogs say they were marred by widespread fraud. Before this election, the state-backed VTsIOM polling agency predicted Russians would give Putin 82% of the vote, his highest ever return, on a turnout of 71%.

Stanislav Andreychuk, a co-chair of the Golos independent election watchdog, said the pressure on voters from law enforcement had reached absurd levels.

“It’s the first time in my life that I’ve seen such absurdities and I’ve been observing elections for 20 years,” Andreychuk wrote on Telegram, referring to the actions of police who he said were checking ballots before they were cast.

Under constitutional changes he orchestrated in 2020, Putin is eligible to seek two more six-year terms after his latest expires next year, potentially allowing him to remain in power until 2036.

If he remains president until then, his tenure will surpass even that of Joseph Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union for 29 years, making Putin the country’s longest-serving leader since the Russian empire.