Alwaght- Vladimir Putin won a new term as president and is to serve the next six years amid a record turnout.
According to Russia’s Central Election Commission, he had some 87 percent of the vote with about 60 percent of precincts counted.
Nationwide turnout was 74.22 percent when polls closed, election officials said, surpassing 2018 levels of 67.5 percent.
In a post-election news conference, Putin cast the outcome as a vindication of his decision to defy the West and push ahead with Ukraine war.
"No matter who or how much they want to intimidate us, no matter who or how much they want to suppress us, our will, our consciousness – no one has ever succeeded in anything like this in history,” Putin said in an address from his campaign headquarters early on Monday morning.
“It has not worked now and will not work in the future. Never.”
The elections were also held in the newly-annexed regions of eastern Ukraine where the majority are ethnic Russians who called for the Russian intervention in Ukraine to protect them.
Western media have been labeling the Russian elections as illegitimate as Putin poses a check to the Western, and particularly NATO, expansionism.
Their anti-Putin propaganda is driven by an antipathy to an independent policy adopted by Putin. Putin's win allows him to tighten his grip on power and further challenge West across the world as the latter is losing its position in more than one part of the world.
Western governments were quick to condemn the election as undemocratic. Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for President Biden’s National Security Council, said “the elections were obviously not free nor fair.”
The main area where the West collides into Russia is Ukraine that has been a scene for war since early 2022. Russia has been wining more fronts than ever in Ukraine as the Western support to President Volodymyr Zelensky began to waver amid Gaza war.
Russian forces in mid-February took control of city of Avdeevka, a city in the center of eastern Ukraine, a development portraying the decline of the Western ally's power to hold against the Russians.
Putin's win will give him a popular mandate to carry on his push against the West and war in Ukraine. This appears to be the main reason why the West describes Russia's elections undemocratic. Actually, the West does not care much about democracy as it is allied to most despotic dictatorships around the world.
