As expected, since the presidential elections in Russia were held without transparency and with real opponents (the real opponents are dead, imprisoned, in exile or prevented from participating), Vladimir Putin won his fifth term as president, in a vote held between Friday (15) and this Sunday (17).
Putin will remain in the Kremlin until 2030, when he will surpass three decades in power as prime minister or president and surpass dictator Josef Stalin (1924-1953), the longest-serving Russian leader since the end of the monarchy in the country.
With 72.46% of the ballots counted, he has 88.42% of the votes. Nikolai Kharitonov of the Communist Party got 4.26%; Vladislav Davankov, from the New People party, 4.12%; and Leonid Slutsky, from the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, 3.20%.
According to the Sputnik agency, voter turnout was 74.22%.
In a speech to supporters at his campaign committee in Moscow, Putin said tonight that his victory “will allow Russia to consolidate its society” and shows that the country “was right in choosing the current path”.
Afterwards, at a press conference, he stated that the protests called for this Sunday by the opposition “had no effect” and that voters who destroyed ballot papers to express their rejection of his government “should be prosecuted”.
Putin began his career as an agent for the KGB, the Soviet Union's secret service. He was working in the agency's East Germany office in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.
Putin never came to terms with the end of the Soviet Union, which occurred in 1991, which he described as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. His dream was to reestablish a Russia with an imperial profile, capable of rivaling the United States.
Back in Russia, he was an advisor at Saint Petersburg city hall, the Kremlin's wealth manager and director of the FSB, one of the security services that replaced the KGB.
In August 1999, Putin became prime minister in Boris Yeltsin's government. The following month, attacks attributed to Chechen separatists took place in different Russian cities and the second Chechen war began, which sent Putin's popularity soaring.
To this day, it is suspected that the attacks were a false flag operation to project the then prime minister. In late 1999, Putin became interim president upon Yeltsin's resignation and in 2000, he was elected to the presidency for the first time. His other elections were in 2004, 2012 and 2018.
Between 2008 and 2012, prevented by the Russian Constitution from seeking a third consecutive term, Putin placed a puppet, Dmitri Medvedev, to preside over the country. The latter, obviously, appointed his political godfather as prime minister so that he could continue calling the shots.
To avoid the 2008 theatrics, in 2020 he held a referendum in which a change in the Constitution was approved so that he could run in the 2024 and 2030 elections (presidential terms became six years after Medvedev).
Domestically, Putin acted with an iron fist, arresting, repressing and killing dissidents (in some cases, even outside Russia). From the oligarchs who benefited from privatizations in the Yeltsin era, he demanded submission and part of the profits – anyone who did not accept was killed, arrested or replaced by Putin's allies.
In its foreign policy, Russia has once again become an agent of global destabilization. Putin was initially willing to dialogue with the West, but later became closer to dictatorships such as China, North Korea, Iran and Venezuela.
His dream of regaining Russian dominance over the former Soviet bloc led him to invade Georgia in 2008, under the pretext of saving the inhabitants of South Ossetia from “genocide” (an argument similar to the one he used to invade Ukraine), and to support the governments of Belarus, in 2020, and Kazakhstan, in 2022, to repress large protests.
But Putin's preferred target has always been Ukraine, which he considers an “artificial state” that should once again become part of Russia.
To subject the country to his interests, he bet his chips on Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Kremlin politician who won the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election. However, after the discovery of fraud, which motivated the protests of the so-called Orange Revolution, the election was held again and Yanukovych lost to Viktor Yushchenko, who had almost died from poisoning during the campaign.
Yanukovych won the 2010 presidential election, but his pro-Russian policies were met with large demonstrations and in 2014 he was ousted.
In retaliation, Putin annexed the Ukrainian province of Crimea and supported separatists in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.
It was a rehearsal for the full-scale invasion of February 2022. Putin held fraudulent referendums to annex four occupied regions of Ukraine (Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia) in the same year and to this day continues his aggression with the alleged goals of “denazifying ” and “demilitarize” the neighboring country. With this Sunday's victory, his threat to the world remains more alive than ever.
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