Russians formed queues outside polling stations at precisely noon Sunday to protest an election with only one possible outcome: Vladimir Putin’s victory.
Voters line up outside a polling station in St. Petersburg at noon on Sunday, part of a protest against President Vladimir Putin. MOSCOW — On the final day of a presidential election with only one possible result, Russians protested Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian hold on power by forming long lines to vote against him at noon Sunday — answering the call of opposition leaderThe “Noon Against Putin” protest, with voters forming queues outside polling stations in major cities like Moscow, St.
But the three days of balloting also gave voters ample opportunity to visit polling stations at a time of their choice, making it all the more obvious that the sudden crowds at midday Sunday had not materialized by accident. “We came here to vote against Putin,” said Elizaveta, 21. “We are going to put three crosses to show that we are for everyone but him. Literally anyone else is better than him.”
Still, the signs of public anger are unmistakable. Some frustrated Russians did not even wait for the Sunday protest and insteadas soon as voting started on Friday, by setting fire to polling stations or ballots or dumping liquid into ballot boxes.
Nikolai, 28, who was at the same polling station, said he was surprised by the big turnout, though some other protesters said they had hoped for even larger crowds. Navalnaya and other prominent opposition leaders appeared at the protest outside the embassy in Berlin, where hundreds of people stood in the line waiting for well over an hour to vote.“People in the Kremlin don’t understand how absurd and stupid they look,” Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former Yukos Oil tycoon who was imprisoned in Russia for 10 years and now lives in exile, told the crowd in Berlin. “We, who are against Putin, we are not marginal, we are the majority.
Putin has repeatedly found ways to defy term limits to stay in power, starting in 2008 when he swapped jobs with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev while remaining the country’s supreme political authority. Four years later, they swapped again. In 2020, Putin engineered constitutional changes that would allow him stay in power until 2036. The term he will claim to win this weekend runs through 2030.
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