Russia’s ruling party is likely to claim a resounding victory in local elections that end Sunday and act as both a dry run for President Vladimir Putin’s reelection next year and an attempt to strengthen the country’s grip on four occupied areas in Ukraine.
Voters in 85 regions are casting their ballot in an election for a range of regional and municipal offices. Russian authorities also are staging local elections in the occupied areas of four Ukrainian regions—Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Luhansk and Kherson — which Moscow annexed a year ago in illegal referendums.
The election offers authorities an opportunity to hone voter turnout and messaging as they aim to deliver Putin a decisive victory when he’s on the ballot in March 2024. A resounding win would demonstrate that he retains the full support of his country amid the ongoing war next door and after a mutiny that posed the biggest challenge to his almost 25-year rule.
“These elections are important” and offer authorities a way to test voting systems and probe which issues and narratives appeal to voters, said Maria Snegovaya, senior fellow with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The Kremlin needs to check it works well ahead of the 2024 reelection of Putin, where the goal would be to showcase the societal unity around Putin despite the war and the economic cost through high electoral numbers.”
Putin, 70, is reasserting control after an armed revolt by Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin in June. Prigozhin and top Wagner aides died on Aug. 23 in a plane crash north of Moscow that US officials said bore the hallmarks of a Kremlin-approved execution, which Moscow denied.
The Russian leader, who unleashed the worst armed conflict in Europe since World War II when he invaded neighboring Ukraine in February 2022, will be poised to overtake Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s almost three-decade rule if he secures a new six-year mandate. While Putin hasn’t yet announced if he will stand for reelection, he has the right under the constitution to two more terms, which would keep him in power until the age of 83.
In total, 65 million people out of Russia’s electorate of 108 million are eligible to vote for the 21 regional leaders, including Moscow mayor, four seats in the lower house of the country’s parliament and other offices on the ballot.
Putin’s also using the elections in the four annexed Ukrainian regions that he partly controls to cement his territorial claim, as Kyiv’s counter-offensive has yet to achieve a decisive breakthrough, despite billions in US and European weapons supplies. Regional voting also is taking place in Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.
In May, Russian lawmakers passed measures to permit elections to take place in regions under martial law. That includes the occupied areas in Ukraine. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said the elections in those areas would have “no validity under international law.”
The voting in those territories is “a blatant violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, Ukrainian laws and international law—in particular the UN statute,” the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. “Pseudo-elections by Russia on temporarily occupied territories are legally void. They will not change the status of Ukrainian territories seized by the Russian army.”
The unprecedented armed rebellion by Prigozhin reflected rising nationalist discontent, including within security structures, at the stalled invasion of Ukraine. Russia has suffered high casualties, with tens of thousands of Russians killed in the fighting, according to western estimates.
“The very fact that elections are being held is important,” given there was a legal opportunity to cancel them amid the ongoing war, said Mikhail Vinogradov, the founder and head of the St. Petersburg Politics Foundation. “The authorities are trying to confirm the perception that nothing terrible is happening inside the country and that they still enjoy significant support from the population.”
Opinion polls show about half of Russians support peace talks, but daily drone attacks now occurring in various Russian regions mean that “everyone is used to the fact that war is routine,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Still, the Russian president is likely to secure a convincing reelection next spring because “people tend to support the leader who wages war,” said Kolesnikov.
Kremlin hones Putin reelection tactics in regional voting as war rages
Source: News Paper Radio
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