AGENCY REPORTS
Anti-Kremlin protesters set fire to voting booths and poured ink into ballot boxes as voting began in Russia’s presidential elections on Friday.
Russian officials claimed that voting had passed off smoothly but protesters still managed to disrupt what was supposed to be a show of support for Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
At around lunchtime, a video from a polling station in Moscow showed a middle-aged woman approaching a booth apparently to make her selection. Instead, she sets fire to the booth, which quickly ignites. She then stands back to record the fire on her smartphone as officials rush to douse the flames.
At another polling station near the Russian capital, a video showed a young, blonde-haired woman slipping her voting paper into a ballot box before pouring a pot of green ink into it.
Other videos showed people setting fire to their ballot papers scrawled with messages reading “Glory to Ukraine” and “Believe my husband!”, possibly a reference to the Kremlin’s attempts to discredit complaints from Russian soldiers who have raised the alarm over dire conditions on the front lines.
Fontanka, a St Petersburg-based news agency, also reported that a protester had thrown a Molotov cocktail at a polling station.
The Kremlin has been determined to frame the presidential election as a show of support for Putin. It wants him to win 80 per cent of the vote and has deployed various tactics to hit these targets, including rolling out easy-to-manipulate electronic voting, pressuring state workers to vote and opening polling stations for three days from Friday, including in occupied parts of Ukraine.
To encourage Russians to vote, polling stations on Friday handed out free food, hosted raffles, laid on entertainment for children and hosted pro-war singers.
One polling station in Tyumen, Siberia, even printed a near-full-sized photograph of US journalist Tucker Carlson, who interviewed Putin this year in a propaganda coup for the Kremlin, for voters to pose next to.
The Kremlin also released a video of Putin voting via the internet from the Kremlin before giving a cheery wave to the camera.
Putin is still popular in large parts of Russia that have been subject to wall-to-wall propaganda for years and voters happily turned up to do their “patriotic duty”. One couple even arrived at their polling station still dressed in their wedding outfits after getting married.
Exiled opposition leaders have asked protesters to throng their polling stations at midday on Sunday in a silent flash mob demonstration. Protests are banned in Russia and the Kremlin has threatened to arrest people taking part in the flash mob.
The Russian presidential election will hand Putin another six years in power. He became president on New Year’s Eve 1999 and by 2030 will be the Kremlin’s longest-serving leader since the revolution, overtaking Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
Ukraine has intensified its attacks on Russia over the past week and on Friday Russian officials reported another heavy drone barrage which hit an oil refinery in the Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow. Earlier this week pro-Ukraine Russian militia also launched their most serious attacks of the war against Russian villages and towns near the border of Ukraine.
