Reuters journalists saw an increase in the flow of voters, especially younger people, at noon at polling stations in Moscow, St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, with queues of several hundred people and even thousands.
Some said they were protesting, though there were few outward signs to distinguish them from ordinary voters.
As noon arrived across Asia and Europe, crowds hundreds strong gathered at polling stations at Russian diplomatic missions. Navalny’s widow, Yulia, appeared at the Russian embassy in Berlin to cheers and chants of “Yulia, Yulia”.
Exiled Navalny supporters broadcast footage on YouTube of protests inside Russia and abroad.
Noon protests
“We showed ourselves, all of Russia and the whole world that Putin is not Russia that Putin has seized power in Russia,” said Ruslan Shaveddinov of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. “Our victory is that we, the people, defeated fear, we defeated solitude – many people saw they were not alone.”
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Leonid Volkov, an exiled Navalny aide who was attacked with a hammer last week in Vilnius, estimated hundreds of thousands of people had come out to polling stations in Moscow, St Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and other cities.
At least 74 people were arrested across Russia on Sunday, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors crackdowns on dissent.
Over the previous two days, there were scattered incidents of protest as some Russians set fire to voting booths or poured green dye into ballot boxes. Russian officials called them scumbags and traitors. Opponents posted some pictures of ballots spoiled with slogans insulting Putin.
But Navalny’s death has left the opposition deprived of its most formidable leader, and other major opposition figures are abroad, in jail or dead.
The West casts Putin as an autocrat and a killer. US President Joe Biden last month dubbed him a “crazy SOB”. The International Criminal Court in the Hague has indicted him for the alleged war crime of abducting Ukrainian children, which the Kremlin denies.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that Putin wanted to rule forever. “There is no legitimacy in this imitation of elections and there cannot be. This person should be on trial in The Hague. That’s what we have to ensure.”
Putin portrays the war as part of a centuries-old battle with a declining and decadent West that he says humiliated Russia after the Cold War by encroaching on Moscow’s sphere of influence.
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“Putin’s task is now to imprint his worldview indelibly into the minds of the Russian political establishment” to ensure a like-minded successor, Nikolas Gvosdev, director of the National Security Program at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, told the Russia Matters project.
Reuters
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