- By Mike Eckel
Pskov Communists Claim Police Raid On Grudinin Offices
The Communist Party branch in the northwest region of Pskov says police raided the local headquarters of the party’s presidential candidate, Pavel Grudinin.
The party said eight officers notified campaign workers that they were responding to complaints that there were banned copies of a newspaper or leaflet. According to a statement posted on the local party’s page on the social network VK, "it’s worth nothing that the law enforcement officers were particularly interested in a caricature...."
No banned leaflets were found, the party said.
Opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, who has called on Russians to boycott the election after he was barred from running, has said the ballot is further proof the election is rigged in favor of incumbent Putin.
Putin's name is smack-dab in the middle of the sheet, accompanied by the briefest biography/description of all the candidates, setting him apart.
'Crimea Is Fundamental' For Putin
Aleksei Venediktov, chief editor of independent radio station Echo Moskvy, says he believes Kommersant was right when it reported (see below note, February 7) that Putin may cast his vote in the Crimean city of Sevastopol.
"I believe this actually is the case, because it seems to me that what is important for Putin is not the count in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Lipetsk, or Chechnya, but the count in Crimea and in Sevastopol," Venediktov said. "In fact, for him, this is a second referendum [after the disputed 2014 referendum in occupied Crimea]. The question is not about the center [of Russia], the question is: How many of those 2 million" -- a reference to the number of voters there -- "will come, and will more cast their vote than in 2014 during its accession [annexation] to Russia, or will there be fewer and by how much? For him, this is fundamental. Crimea is fundamental for him."
Final Candidate List Announced
Russia's Central Election Commission Chairwoman Ella Pamfilova has announced in a live broadcast that officials have registered the last two of eight candidates to take part in the March 18 presidential election.
TV personality Ksenia Sobchak of the Civil Initiative party and the leader of the Communists Of Russia Party, Maksim Suraikin, were formally cleared today, the last day for registration.
The other six candidates are: three-term President Vladimir Putin; Boris Titov of the Party of Growth; Sergei Baburin of the Russian All-People Union Party; Grigory Yavlinsky of Yabloko; Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia; and Communist Party Of Russia nominee Pavel Grudinin.
Center for Eastern Studies' Take On Navalny 'Strike' Rallies
More than 380 people were detained during the January 28 "voter strike" rallies across Russia organized by opposition activist Aleksei Navalny.
But the Warsaw-based Center for Eastern Studies (OSW) argues that the response by authorities was relatively mild, reflecting what OSW sees as the Kremlin's reluctance to inflame the situation ahead of the presidential poll.
- By Mike Eckel
'Our Problem Is 2024'
Putin is widely expected to win next month’s election, giving him another six years to lead Russia from the Kremlin. But what happens next?
The Russian Constitution currently limits the president to two six-year terms, meaning Putin would have to leave office in 2024.
In 2018 Election Is No Problem For Putin -- But What About 2024?, Guardian Moscow correspondent Shaun Walker dives into questions about what might come next, and whether the Kremlin might have something up its sleeve that would cement Putin as the country’s paramount leader, possibly without making a mockery of the constitution.
“I don’t think Putin has made a decision yet about what he will do in 2024,” said one source close to the Kremlin. “He always likes to postpone a decision if it can be made tomorrow rather than today.”
Walker concludes:
Worried supporters of Putin also have their eye on the long-term. “Our problem is not 2018, our problem is 2024,” said Konstantin Malofeyev, a financier with Kremlin connections. He has backed an organisation calling for a return to the monarchy and hinted that Putin could fill the role of a new tsar – a solution few expect to transpire but which illustrates the lack of current alternatives.
“We can see elections are pointless, like showbusiness. We will support Putin fully in these elections and we hope they will be the last elections we have,” he said, during a roundtable meeting with journalists at his Moscow office in December.
- By Mike Eckel
Russian Activists Plan Boycotts, Protests At U.S. Locations
The Russian government is planning to organize early, and same-day, voting around the world for expatriates, including in the United States.
But opposition activists living in the U.S. say they have their own plans. Vitaly Ataev-Troshin, a Russian living in California, is working to organize boycotts and protests outside planned polling places on March 18, aimed at calling attention to what they say is a rigged vote. He’s already had some success with early voting: a Sheraton Hotel in Los Angeles rejected a request by Russian diplomats to host a polling place. Another activist in Washington, Dmitry Valuev, said activists are planning to march outside the Russian Embassy and the three other consulates in the United States.
A Russian Embassy spokesman, meanwhile, told the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta that such acts were depriving Russian citizens of their constitutional right to vote.