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Ukrainian leader Volodimir Zelensky He said Sunday that Vladimir Putin is “drunk with power” and wants to “reign eternally,” after the announcement of the results of a mouth poll ballot box indicating that he won the election, securing a new six-year term.
“It is clear to anyone in the world that this person, as has often happened in history, is drunk with power and wants to rule forever. “There is no evil that he does not commit to prolong his personal power,” he added. Zelensky in a message on social networks.
For his part, UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron lamented on Sunday the lack of “free and fair” elections in Russia.
In a message on and cooperation in Europe.
The presidential election was held in the context of the harshest repression of political opposition and freedom of expression in Russia since Soviet times. Only three symbolic candidates – and none who oppose his war in Ukraine – were able to run against Vladimir Putin in his quest for a fifth term.
With this farce, Putin is preparing to extend his mandate of almost a quarter of a century for six more years, after a relentless repression of dissent.
The polls were open from Friday to Sunday in Russia, in a tightly controlled environment in which any public criticism of him or his war in Ukraine is repressed.
Putin’s staunchest political enemyAlexei Navalny died under dubious circumstances in an Arctic prison last month, and other critics are in jail or in exile. Beyond the fact that voters have virtually no choice, independent oversight of the elections was also extremely limited.
Navalny’s collaborators urged those dissatisfied with Putin or the war to protest by going to the polls at noon on Sunday, and the lines at several polling stations, both within Russia and at its embassies around the world, seemed to multiply at that time. hour. The protest was called “Noon against Putin” and was replicated in several capitals around the world.
Putin, 71, He has already served two four-year terms and two six-year terms, with an intermediate period as prime minister. in which he continued to be the strong man of the country.
Emerged from the Soviet KGBSince his arrival in the Kremlin on December 31, 1999, he implemented a vertical power structure that over the years was characterized by constant hardening and the attempt to restore a geopolitical influence lost with the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
The hardening led him to impose himself on the oligarchs of the system, to unleash the second war in Chechnya and to suffocate public freedoms, the press and the opposition. The search for geopolitical power had its milestones in the war in Georgia (2008), the annexation of Ukrainian Crimea (2014), the military intervention in Syria (2015) and the invasion of Ukraine (2022).
If he completed a new term, he would have remained in power longer than any other Russian leader since Catherine the Great in the 18th century.
(With information from AFP)
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