Vladimir Putin heads for victory in Russia election without a real opponent

Already Russia’s longest-serving leader since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, 71-year-old Putin is set to extend his nearly quarter-century rule by another six years with his troops on the offensive in Ukraine. Russia’s pressing its advantage in the third year of the invasion as Ukraine struggles to supply its forces with munitions amid delays in military aid from its US and European allies.

Russia’s wartime economy has largely weathered the shock of unprecedented international sanctions, thanks to a continuing flow of energy revenues and a massive injection of government spending to support the defense industry and shield domestic businesses. Trade with China is booming as Russia reorients its economy away from markets in Europe.

“In the last two years, the Putin regime has rebuilt every element of itself to adapt to a permanent state of war,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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Ukraine has waged an intensifying campaign of drone attacks aimed at key Russian infrastructure including oil refineries ahead of the election. Authorities said the refinery in Slavyansk-on-Kuban in the southern Krasnodar region was hit overnight, causing a fire that was later extinguished, after several plants were targeted on Saturday.

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The Russian Defense Ministry said it repelled 35 drone attacks in eight regions overnight, including Moscow. Separately, Russia said it foiled an attempted incursion in the Belgorod region bordering Ukraine on Saturday by what Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said were as many as 2,500 fighters.

Three rebel Russian groups — the Russian Volunteer Corps, the Siberian Battalion and the Legion of Freedom — that are fighting on the side of Ukraine have declared they’re carrying out cross-border attacks as part of a campaign aimed at overthrowing Putin’s regime by extending the war onto his territory.

Putin dismissed prospects for a halt to the war in a televised interview on Wednesday, saying he’s not interested in a “pause” that would allow Ukraine to re-arm. Russia wants written security guarantees to end the fighting and the “realities on the ground” should be the basis for any negotiations, he said.

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Russia occupies about a fifth of Ukraine including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014. Putin has declared four regions of eastern and southern Ukraine to be “forever” part of Russia, even as his forces don’t fully control them.

Russia organized voting in the presidential election in occupied areas of Ukraine. The Foreign Ministry in Kyiv said the votes were illegal and called on Ukrainians in the territories not to take part in the “pseudo-elections.”

Putin voted Friday via computer, avoiding the traditional visit to a polling station that he’s made in past presidential elections. The government said more than 4.5 million people have registered to vote online in a system being used in 29 of Russia’s regions for the first time in the presidential ballot.

Critics say the system may make it harder to identify fraud in the results.

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Allies of the late opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who died last month in an Arctic prison camp, have urged supporters to protest Putin’s election by turning up to vote at polling stations at exactly noon on Sunday.

Russia didn’t invite observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to monitor the election. The OSCE said in January this was evidence “democratic backsliding” had reached a critical point.

Despite the predictability of the vote, Russian officials are in no mood to admit shortcomings in the election.

“We won’t tolerate criticism of our democracy any longer,” Peskov told a youth conference in Moscow earlier this month. “Our democracy is the best.”