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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)
Victoria Prisedskaya Will Vernon
Reporting from Warsaw BBC News, Washington
Russian electoral commission has awarded Putin more than 90% of the vote in Russian-occupied Donetsk. Over the course of the day, protesters - and voters - gathered at noon at Russian embassies around the world. In the next few posts we'll bring you the view from Yerevan, Riga and Tel Aviv. We kick off with Washington:
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. Protesting earlier outside the Russian embassy in Washington, DC is lawyer and activist Lyubov Sobol.
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”. She was one of the closest aides of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei
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.” Navalny, who died in an Arctic penal colony last month.
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”. She tells me that
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. Alexei Navalny would be “very happy” to see the anti-Putin events across Russia
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. and abroad today.
"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. “Obviously we know that the final results will show whatever
"There was something on billboards and in schools too, I can’t read it – have bad eyesight. It's absolutely absurd," he added. number the Kremlin decides to put out,” Sobol says.
“We probably won’t see
the votes being made now in the results. But this solidarity, this symbol, is
nonetheless important.”
Repression in Russia now, she says, has reached “maximum
levels”.
The people here of course are not in Russia, they are in the
United States, and therefore the risk to them for taking part in such an event
is lower.
For people still inside Russia, participating in any kind of protest
whatsoever can lead to arrest.
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