Vladimir Putin, an “independent” candidate for the Russian presidency, presented the documentation needed by the Central Electoral Commission in Moscow to register, two days after a group of supporters formally nominated him. A formality for the announced winner of the March 17 vote, the same day the Council of the European Union announced the adoption of the twelfth package of economic sanctions against Russia, which includes measures to combat the evasion of previous sanctions and the ban on diamonds export to Europe.
For Putin, 71 years old, political opposition is not a problem as he serves a fifth presidential term. His accomplices who decided to raise their own voices to criticize the direction of the “special military operation” did not fare well. The head of the mercenaries Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a plane crash and Igor “Strelkov” Girkin, active in the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbass, is arrested, accused of extremism, and after voicing his candidacy for the presidency in prison announced, now said he was afraid of “getting amnesty like the cook”, referring to Prigozhin’s death.
In a recent interview with El País, exiled journalist and activist Maria Pevchikh predicted a victory for Putin with “85% support and 85% participation” and that his continuity in power will only worsen repression. “The entire opposition is in jail; last week the LGBT movement was classified as an extremist organization; and now they are considering banning abortion. Who knows what comes next? Reintroduction of the death penalty? Putin will never be satisfied with the level of repression,” said the director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, the organization led by Alexei Navalny, the jailed opponent who missed another court hearing 10 days after his team lost contact.
If the Kremlin will have everything under control at the level of organized politics, the discontent of the military and their families could cause problems, especially if there is a general mobilization. “This could be one of their big internal problems,” Pevchickh pointed out. When questioned by the Levada polling station, Russians highlighted war and mobilization as the main topics they would have liked to ask the president about at his annual meeting with the press. Putin limited himself to saying that there is “no need” for new mobilization, after reporting the existence of 617,000 soldiers in Ukraine, of which 244,000 have been mobilized “directly in the combat zone.”
What the Kremlin predicted would be a “three-day war” culminating in a crushing life struggle, but Putin’s political calculation has ignored the human losses, and without the capacity for military victory, he is betting on the degradation of Ukraine’s resources and division. of the West to prevent its strengthening.
Under sanctions and in times of war, an election campaign, even in a regime far removed from democratic norms, poses a number of challenges. There are those who believe that the recent statements by Cyril, the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, urging the authorities to restrict abortions – and which had the immediate result of taking measures in more than a dozen regions to prevent or limit abortions in private clinics, do not arise by chance.
Days later, Putin seemed Solomonic: he is against the ban on abortion, but the termination of pregnancy clashes with the interests of Mother Russia and said he wanted women to “safeguard the life of the child” to solve “the demographic problem” of the country. Interviewed by AFP, political analyst Ekaterina Schulmann said abortion and Russia’s demographic winter are issues to be debated in a pre-election period when “you cannot talk about the war or the state of the economy”.
With no prospect of improving relations with the West – unless Donald Trump returns to the White House in 2025 – Putin, who did not even bother to present an election manifesto in previous elections, is now aiming to destroy the Russian Federation a “sovereign and self-sufficient power”. The growth of the country’s economy, whose labor market lost hundreds of thousands of people who fled the mobilization, now depends on the war effort: defense costs will amount to almost a third of the total.
Quoted by Trump
At a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday, Republican primary candidate Donald Trump attacked immigrants with rhetoric similar to Adolf Hitler and quoted Vladimir Putin. In September, the Russian leader claimed that the accusations against the former US president amount to nothing more than “persecution of a political rival for political reasons.” Now Trump quoted the following passage from the statements: “It shows the rot of the American political system, which cannot claim to teach democracy to others.”
The New York businessman never concealed his admiration for the Russian. When he invaded Ukraine, Trump considered it a “genius” decision. Trump’s meeting set off alarm bells: in addition to calling Hungarian Viktor Orbán “the man who can save the West,” he accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of the country — a phrase taken from Hitler’s introduction to Jews.
Source: DN
