Vladimir Putin claims fifth term with landslide election victory

President Vladimir Putin claimed his fifth term in office on Sunday as exit polls showed him winning Russia’s election, despite widespread protests at polling stations and the US saying the vote was not free or fair.
Mr Putin addressed crowds at his headquarters late on Sunday after the partial results, telling them he was ready for talks on a French proposal for a ceasefire in Ukraine during the Olympic Games.
But he said he would need to take Russia’s interests on the frontline into account.
“I want to thank all of you and all citizens of the country for your support and this trust,” Mr Putin.
“No matter who or how much they want to intimidate us, no matter who or how much they want to suppress us, our will, our consciousness – no one has ever succeeded in anything like this in history.
“It has not worked now and will not work in the future. Never.”
Mr Putin will use the result to underscore to the West that its leaders will have to reckon with an emboldened Russia, whether in war or in peace, for many more years to come.
First coming to power in 1999, Mr Putin, 71, will easily secure a new six-year term that would enable him to overtake Joseph Stalin and become Russia’s longest-serving leader for more than 200 years.
Mr Putin won 87.8 per cent of the vote, the highest in Russia’s post-Soviet history, according to an exit poll by the Public Opinion Foundation.
The Russian Public Opinion Research Centre put Mr Putin on 87 per cent. First official results indicated the polls were accurate.
“The elections are obviously not free nor fair, given how Mr Putin has imprisoned political opponents and prevented others from running against him,” a US National Security Council representative said.
The election comes just over two years since Mr Putin began the deadliest European conflict since the Second World War by ordering the invasion of Ukraine. He casts it as a “special military operation”.
War has hung over the three-day election. Ukraine has repeatedly attacked oil refineries in Russia, shelled Russian regions and sought to pierce Russian borders with proxy forces – a move Mr Putin said would not be left unpunished.
While his re-election was not in doubt given his control over Russia and the absence of any real challengers, the former KGB spy wanted to show that he has the overwhelming support of Russians.
Nationwide turnout was 74.22 per cent at 6pm GMT when polls closed, election officials said, passing the 2018 levels of 67.5 per cent.
Supporters of Mr Putin’s most prominent opponent, Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison last month, had called on Russians to come out at a “Noon against Putin” protest to show their dissent against a leader they describe as a corrupt autocrat.
There was no independent tally of how many of Russia’s 114 million voters took part in the opposition demonstrations, amid extremely tight security involving tens of thousands of police and security officials.
Reuters reported an increase in the flow of voters, especially younger people, at noon at polling stations in Moscow, St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, with queues of several hundred people and even thousands.
Some said they were protesting, although there were few outward signs to distinguish them from ordinary voters.
As noon arrived across Asia and Europe, crowds hundreds strong gathered at polling stations at Russian diplomatic missions.
Mr Navalny’s widow, Yulia, appeared at the Russian embassy in Berlin to cheers and chants of “Yulia, Yulia”.
Exiled supporters of Mr Navalny broadcast footage on YouTube of protests inside Russia and abroad.
“We showed ourselves, all of Russia and the whole world, that Putin is not Russia that Putin has seized power in Russia,” said Ruslan Shaveddinov, of Mr Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.
“Our victory is that we, the people, defeated fear, we defeated solitude. Many people saw they were not alone.”
Leonid Volkov, an exiled aide of Mr Navalny who was attacked with a hammer last week in Vilnius, estimated hundreds of thousands of people had come out to polling stations in Moscow, St Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and other cities.
At least 74 people were arrested on Sunday across Russia, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors crackdowns on dissent.
Over the previous two days, there were scattered incidents of protest as some Russians set fire to voting booths or poured green dye into ballot boxes.
Russian officials called them scumbags and traitors. .
Opponents posted some pictures of ballots spoiled with slogans insulting Mr Putin.
But Mr Navalny’s death has deprived the opposition of its most formidable leader, and other major opposition figures are abroad, in jail or dead.
The West casts Mr Putin as an autocrat and a killer.
US President Joe Biden last month dubbed him a “crazy SOB”.
The International Criminal Court in the Hague has indicted him for the alleged war crime of abducting Ukrainian children, which the Kremlin denies.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday that Mr Putin wanted to rule forever.
“There is no legitimacy in this imitation of elections and there cannot be,” Mr Zelenskyy said. “This person should be on trial in The Hague. That’s what we have to ensure.”
Mr Putin portrays the war as part of a centuries-old battle with a declining and decadent West that he says humiliated Russia after the Cold War by encroaching on Moscow’s sphere of influence.
“Putin’s task is now to imprint his worldview indelibly into the minds of the Russian political establishment” to ensure a like-minded successor, Nikolas Gvosdev, director of the national security programme at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, told the Russia Matters project.
“For a US administration that hoped Putin’s Ukraine adventure would be wrapped up by now with a decisive setback to Moscow’s interests, the election is a reminder that Putin expects that there will be many more rounds in the geopolitical boxing ring.”
Russia’s election comes at what western intelligence chiefs say is a crossroads for the Ukraine war and the wider West, in what Mr Biden casts as a 21st century struggle between democracies and autocracies.
Support for Ukraine is tangled in US domestic politics ahead of the November presidential election pitting Mr Biden against his predecessor Donald Trump, whose Republican party in Congress has blocked military aid for Kyiv.
Although Kyiv recaptured territory after the invasion in 2022, Russian forces have lately made gains after a failed Ukrainian counter-offensive last year.
The Biden administration fears Mr Putin could grab a bigger slice of Ukraine unless Kyiv gets more support soon. CIA director William Burns has said that could embolden China.
Mr Putin says the West is engaged in a hybrid war against Russia and that western intelligence and Ukraine tried to disrupt the elections.
Voting also took place in Crimea, which Moscow took from Ukraine in 2014, and four other Ukrainian regions it partly controls and has claimed since 2022.
Kyiv regards the election on occupied territory as illegal and void.