School Lines Up Students For Putin

An English teacher in Daghestan enlisted schoolchildren in a pro-Putin action, Current Time TV reports.

The local administration posted on VK the lineup of kids holding signs like "Putin our President" and "Thanks for everything to Putin," and "We vote for Putin."

More Portraits of Putin From Children

Blogger Ilya Varlamov has collected some of the portraits of President Putin that have been submitted to a national competition being organized in connection with the March 18 election.

Election Supervisor Says Four Candidates Filed 'Inauthentic' Asset Declarations

The Central Election Commission says four candidates have not yet filed "authentic information about their income," according to Interfax.

The commission did not say which candidates it had in mind but merely added that the four have been informed of the problem and that it will be corrected before the official election poster is printed.

Asset declarations can be seen by clicking on the names of the candidates on the Central Election Commission's website.

Back to the terrible '90s?

One of the main arguments that Putin's supporters like to assert is that he pulled Russia out of the "disaster" of the 1990s.

But in at least one regard, Putin is returning to that time. His election slogan -- "A strong president -- a strong Russia!" was apparently first test-marketed by Boris Yeltsin, as this side-by-side image shows. Right down to the exclamation mark.

It isn't clear, but the Yeltsin poster probably stems from the time of Russia's April 1993 referendum on whether Russians backed the president or the parliament in the country's developing political standoff. Russians still remember how to vote on that four-question referendum from the endlessly repeated slogan, "Da, da, nyet, da."

More On Putin's 'Cold'

After the Kremlin announced that President Putin "has a cold" and began canceling his public appearances, some on Russian social media immediately began joking that he was actually undergoing plastic surgery. There have been unconfirmed rumors for many years that the 65-year-old Putin uses botox injections and other medical procedures to keep up his appearance.

This meme, for example, says that "By the time of the election, Putin will look younger than Sobchak," who is 36.

Commission Asks State TV To Reconsider Stone-Putin Broadcasts

Vedomosti reports that the Central Election Committee has asked state-owned Channel One television to rethink plans to rebroadcast a series of interviews this week that filmmaker Oliver Stone conducted with President Putin in 2015-17.

The committee said that broadcasting the program would not violate the law because it does not urge people to vote in any particular way and does not include any positive or negative characterizations of any candidates, including Putin. However, the CEC told Channel One "it is necessary to act with a heightened degree of care" to prevent the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Earlier, the Yavlinsky and Sobchak campaigns complained about the four-part program, which began airing on February 12 and is scheduled to continue through February 15.

An interesting sample of the national "draw the president" contest that Robert Coalson flagged on this page yesterday.

Grudinin Says He Would Recognize Ukrainian Separatist Regions

During a campaign stop in Novosibirsk on February 13, Communist Party presidential candidate Pavel Grudinin said if he were elected president, he would recognize so-called Luhansk and Donetsk people's republics, the self-proclaimed separatist formations in eastern Ukraine that are battling against the Ukrainian government with Russian support.

He also said that Crimea, the Ukrainian region that was annexed by Russia in 2014, is "Russian territory."

"If Russian people want to live with us, we must take them in," he said. "That is what we did."

Human Rights Icon Kovalyov Joins Sobchak Campaign

Sergei Kovalyov, the 87-year-old Soviet-era human rights dissident and heir to the mantle of Andrei Sakharov, has agreed to become an official representative of Ksenia Sobchak's presidential campaign.

"There are many opposition politicians and many of them are honorable people," Kovalyov said during a livestream meeting with Sobchak filmed in his Moscow kitchen. "But they compete with one another. But you have a tendency to speak for civil society. That is very important."

Kovalyov said that he would write a letter to Yabloko candidate Grigory Yavlinsky to personally explain his decision to back Sobchak instead of him.

Kovalyov praised the journalist and socialite for her recent trip to Chechnya, where she highlighted the appalling human rights record in the region under Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov.

For her part, Sobchak thanked Kovalyov for his support and pledged to do her best to live up to his expectations.

Speaking to Russian state television cameras, Sobchak said she wants to see a memorial to slain opposition politician Boris Nemtsov in Russia "sooner than a Nemtsov Square appears in the United States." She said the failure to erect a memorial in Russia was "shameful."

Sobchak is gathering signatures on a petition to the Moscow city government calling for a Nemtsov memorial.

Putin's Cold And The Campaign

In his column for Republic.ru, opposition journalist Oleg Kashin plays off the Kremlin's announcement that Putin has a cold and is cancelling public appearances and speculates what the election would look like if the Kremlin leader decided he "was too lazy to campaign at all." Would it even matter?

"When Putin is healthy, some of his 'working meetings' are shown on television. And when Putin is ill, they also show 'working meetings.' There is no difference at all, and that makes the news of Putin's cold cold senseless," Kashin writes.