President Putin wins re-election with 87 percent of the vote to extend 25-year rule in Russia

Vladimir Putin has won Russia’s re-election, claiming another six-year term as Russian president to extend his 25-year rule in a distorted election in which all serious challengers were wiped out before voting began.

With 50 percent of ballots counted, Putin’s tally stood at 87.3 percent of the vote, election officials announced. Turnout was 73.33 percent, according to the latest figures from Russian authorities.

Communist candidate Nikolai Kharitonov finished second with just under 4%, newcomer Vladislav Davankov third, and ultra-nationalist Leonid Slutsky fourth, partial results suggested.

This is the biggest share of the vote Putin has claimed in any of his five presidential election wins since his first in 2000. At 71, he is already the longest-serving Russian leader. 

Speaking after the early results were announced, Putin vowed to lead Russia to victory in achieving his goals, saying “nobody in history has ever succeeded” in suppressing the will of Russians. “They failed now and they will fail in the future,” he said.

Nikolai Petrov from the Chatham House foreign affairs think tank in London said the result made Russia a “totally consolidated autocracy.”

The Russian president’s win occurred despite calls from the supporters of his most prominent opponent, the late Alexei Navalny, who urged their fellow citizens to come out at a “Noon against Putin” protest to voice their dissent against his government.  

Putin told reporters he regarded Russia’s election as democratic and said the Navalny-inspired protest against him had had no effect on the election’s outcome.

In his first comments on his death, he also said that Navalny’s passing had been a “sad event” and confirmed that he had been ready to do a prisoner swap involving the opposition politician.

When asked by a NBC, a U.S. TV network, whether his re-election was democratic, Putin criticised the U.S. political and judicial systems.

“The whole world is laughing at what is happening (in the United States),” he said. “This is just a disaster, not a democracy.”

“…Is it democratic to use administrative resources to attack one of the candidates for the presidency of the United States, using the judiciary among other things?” he asked, making an apparent reference to four criminal cases against Republican candidate Donald Trump.