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Russian election: President Vladimir Putin claims fifth term in inevitable poll landslide - BBC News Russian election: President Vladimir Putin claims fifth term in inevitable poll landslide - BBC News
(32 minutes later)
President Vladimir Putin says his win in the election will allow Russia to become stronger and more effective. Victoria Prisedskaya
Speaking at his campaign headquarters, Putin says: "Out of every voice, we are building a common will of the people of Russian Federation." Reporting from Warsaw
He also thanks the citizens who came to the polling stations and expresses "special gratitude to our warriors on the line of contact", referring to the front line of the war in Ukraine. Russian electoral commission has awarded Putin more than 90% of the vote in Russian-occupied Donetsk.
"No matter how hard they tried to scare us, suppress our Donetsk is the largest city in eastern Ukraine that’s now occupied by Russia and it’s where Moscow has wished to boast most loyalty.
will, our conscience, no-one has ever succeeded in history. They failed now, and When he announced his “special military operation” in Ukraine more than two years ago, President Vladimir Putin justified it with the need to “defend the people of Donbas”.
they will fail in the future," he adds. The Russian-installed authorities there launched a large campaign to attract voters. They sent people with ballot boxes to residents’ homes, adapting, and adopting, a famous slogan: “It’s not the voter who goes to the polling station, but the polling station comes to the voter.”
The Russian election has been described as neither free nor fair by some of his international counterparts. Photos on local social media showed people with ballot boxes, heavily equipped with the official symbols of the 2024 presidential election, the V-sign, also associated with what Russia has been calling a "special military operation”.
The former KGB leader, who has been in power since 1999 will lead the country for a fifth term. They invited residents to tick the ballot paper no matter where they happened to be - using table tennis tables at playgrounds, car hoods, or benches in the courtyards.
But tonight's results were no surprise, as any credible opposition to Vladimir Putin is either in jail, in exile or dead. The residents’ attitude towards this event seem rather apathetic, even in Donetsk where the Kremlin propaganda has been relentlessly doing its job for a decade.
"Are these elections? No one pays attention to this fiction. The number of votes has been already fixed and approved," a resident of Donetsk told BBC Ukrainian.
"There was something on billboards and in schools too, I can’t read it – have bad eyesight. It's absolutely absurd," he added.
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