Surprise surprise, Putin is voted Russian president in ‘sham election’, exit polls show

If announced by Russian voting officials, this will make Putin the longest-serving ruler since Stalin (Picture: Getty Images)

In one of the least surprising things to happen this year, Vladimir Putin has been voted once again the president of Russia, according to exit polls.

Putin, 71, is leading a presidential election where opposition was basically banned with 87.68% of votes so far, according to election officials who have counted 30.08% of ballots.

This all but cements Putin’s rule over Russia for another six years and makes him the longest-serving ruler since Joseph Stalin.

After the death of his harshest critic in an Artic prison, Aleksei Navalny, none of his other competitors posed much of a threat.

Nikolai Kharitonov, of the Communist Party who badly lost to Putin in 2004, gained 4.6% of the votes, according to exit poll data from the Russian Public Opinion Research Center published Sunday evening.

Protesters showed out in force outside the Russian embassy in London this afternoon (Picture: Reuters)

Vladislav Davankov, of the New People Party who has long called for ‘peace’ in Ukraine while always agreeing more or less with the Kremlin leader, bagged 4.2% of the votes.

Fourth was Leonid Slutsky, a Putin loyalist of the Liberal Democratic Party, who asked his supporters to vote for Putin anyway.

None were even that different from Putin. Every other major name on the ballot is a member of the Duma who also voted for the Russia-Ukraine war, even more censorship and to tear up human rights laws.

The Kremlin had also outlawed all criticism of Putin or his war. As much as this would have made campaigning a bit difficult for opposition candidates, the Kremlin blocked them from running anyway.

A second exit poll conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation similarly showed Putin leading with 87.8%. While nearly nine in 10 voters in Moscow ticked Putin’s name in the voting booths, the Moscow City Election Commission said.

By this evening turnout was more than 70%, according to the Central Election Commission, though this excludes the 4.3 million who voted online.

At the encouragement of Yulia Navalnaya, Alexei Navalny’s widow, many Russians have spoilt their ballot papers for the present election

Not many people will be surprised that the election, which began Friday and will last until the booths close 9pm local time in Russia’s westernmost Kaliningrad region, will end this way.

But opposition leaders certainly tried their best. The ‘Noon Against Putin’ saw Navalny allies urge Russians to swarm polling places in a symbolic protest.

Long lines quickly formed outside polling stations, including Moscow and St Petersburg.

Expats in England also joined in. Thousands gathered outside the Russian embassy in London to vote today, with Metro.co.uk seeing examples of spoiled ballots that include, among other things, doodles of phalluses.

If the final vote share is indeed in the high 80s, this is higher than the 77% that saw Putin cruise back into power in 2018.

Putin, who was first appointed successor to President Boris Yeltsin in 2000, has long said he’ll stay in power for as long as Russia’s constitution allows him to.

‘This is not good and it is detrimental for the country and I do not need it either,’ he said in 2014 when asked if he wanted to be president forever.

‘We will see what the situation will be like, but in any case the term of my work is restricted by the Constitution.”’

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