Mykola sarcastically wonders whether or not he “voted right”.
The Ukrainian police officer left his dwelling village close to the southeastern metropolis of Mariupol on February 25, 2022, the day after Russia’s full-scale invasion started.
Greater than two years later, his aged dad and mom, who opted to remain below Russian occupation, informed him they noticed his title within the checklist of voters on the March 15-17 presidential vote.
In his absence, election officers faked his “vote” for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Mykola alleged, echoing stories of widespread vote rigging documented by uncommon and closely persecuted unbiased displays within the Russia-occupied elements of 4 Ukrainian areas – and in Russia correct.
Mykolay’s dad and mom additionally informed him about how masked, closely armed servicemen plodded the streets accompanying election officers who urged residents to fill in early ballots.
“Government employees have been forced to vote, required to provide photo reports” exhibiting their ballots with Putin’s title ticked off, Mykola, who withheld his final title and his village’s location to guard his dad and mom, informed Al Jazeera.
Vote rigging within the Russia-occupied elements of 4 Ukrainian areas harks again to the many years of comparable practices documented in Russia that included coercion to vote, poll staffing, and “carousels” – when teams of individuals are bussed to dozens of polling stations.
This reporter, accompanied by an unbiased election monitor in a northern Moscow suburb through the 2012 presidential vote, witnessed the arrival of a number of busloads of males, a few of them visibly drunk, who loudly mentioned they “only vote for Putin”.
Hours later, the identical males arrived at a unique polling station, this reporter noticed.
An election official on the time mentioned the “usual” winners at earlier elections have been both Communist Celebration chief Gennady Zyuganov or flamboyant ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
Nonetheless, the polling station at all times reported Putin’s victory, the official – a drained trainer who completed counting the votes at 4am – mentioned on situation of anonymity.
‘Record falsification’
Some 110 million Russians have been eligible to vote this month, and 87.1 million solid their ballots at polling stations or used an digital voting system, Russia’s chief election official Ella Pamfilova mentioned.
Nearly 65 million of them voted for Putin, she mentioned.
However at the least 31.6 million votes for Putin have been falsified, claimed Novaya Gazeta, an unbiased newspaper that has for many years been among the many most trusted media shops in Russia.
Novaya Gazeta’s analysts used a mathematical mannequin developed by election monitor Sergey Shpilkin that makes use of a discrepancy between voter turnout and votes for every candidate.
If turnout at a person polling station all of a sudden will increase, the voting goes up sharply just for one candidate in opposition to statistical odds – specifically, Putin, in line with the mannequin.
This yr’s vote beat all earlier data of vote rigging, Novaya Gazeta claimed.
“This is a record amount of vote falsification at a presidential vote in Russia,” it reported.
Golos, Russia’s final unbiased election monitor whose staffers and volunteers have confronted fines and arrests, mentioned the vote was the least constitutional since Putin got here to energy in 2000.
“We’ve never seen a presidential campaign that was so far from constitutional standards,” Golos mentioned in an announcement.
The important thing phrase of this yr’s presidential marketing campaign was “imitation,” it mentioned.
The Kremlin imitated the liberty of selection and campaigning with the participation of opposition candidates who have been solely figureheads from pro-Kremlin political events, it mentioned.
The Kremlin additionally imitated transparency and openness, election monitoring and the independence of election officers, Golos mentioned.
To a jailed Putin critic, Putin’s futile makes an attempt to make his rule look reliable have been on full present.
“Perhaps, the results of these ‘elections’ must make the antiwar part of the public apathetic. Apparently, they were designed to,” Ilya Yashin, who was sentenced to eight and a half years in jail for lambasting Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, wrote on Fb on Monday.
“But it only makes me smirk with derision. These ‘elections’ are not a sign of the dictator’s force, but his self-exposure,” he wrote.
And but, the vote signifies a tectonic shift in public opinion “from generally antiwar and neutral views to generally prowar ones”, Nikolay Mitrokhin of Germany’s Bremen College informed Al Jazeera.
He mentioned despite the fact that the turnout was under the official determine, about two-thirds of voters nonetheless turned up due to a large and massively profitable “propaganda” marketing campaign that was boosted by Ukraine’s indiscriminate bombing of border Russian areas.
Even pro-democratic Russians, as soon as impartial concerning the battle, now need “Russia’s unambiguous victory,” he mentioned.
One of many causes is “a response to Ukraine’s response to the war, and Putin’s propaganda in particular,” Mitrokhin mentioned.
When common Russians need to test what they hear from Kremlin-controlled media, they surf Ukrainian web sites and “see that yes, they are hated, called not just aggressors, but various racist names, and everything Russian and related to Russia is banned,” Mitrokhin mentioned.
A Russian nationwide who lives in Germany agrees with him, having seen how aged Russian-speaking males who emigrated from ex-Soviet Kazakhstan reply to Ukrainian activists picketing the Russian consulate in Frankfurt.
“Sometimes, fights broke out,” Konstantin Rubalsky, a 47-year-old IT knowledgeable who visited the consulate a dozen occasions to acquire paperwork for his kids, informed Al Jazeera. “Kazakh grandpas are tough and respond with force.”
One more reason why Russians voted for Putin, Mitrokhin added, is the resilience of their economic system within the face of Western sanctions together with Moscow’s average features on the entrance traces in 2023 and early 2024.
Despite the fact that Russia has been hit with the biggest set of sanctions in fashionable historical past, excessive oil costs and elevated army spending heated the economic system and triggered a consumption growth.
“I’ve never seen Moscow consume so much, they’re buying stuff like there’s no tomorrow,” David, a lawyer in Moscow who withheld his final title, informed Al Jazeera.
After Russian suppliers discovered methods to ship sanctioned Western items by way of ex-Soviet republics and use money or cryptocurrencies to pay for them, something is offered, he mentioned.
“The boom is obvious, and those who gain from it feel different emotions, from guilt to gambling rush,” he mentioned. “But all of my friends understand the fun could be over tomorrow.”