Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he will run again for office in Russia's March presidential election in which he is expected to easily win a new six-year term and extend the longest rule of a Kremlin leader since Josef Stalin.
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Putin, 71, made the long-anticipated announcement on December 8 following a ceremony in the Kremlin, where he awarded soldiers who fought in the war in Ukraine with Russia's highest military honor, the Hero of Russia Gold Star.
The setting -- St. George Hall, which the president said, "embodies the greatness of Russia's military glory" -- with uniformed soldiers present may indicate he will campaign as a war leader, Brian Taylor, a political science professor and Russia expert at Syracuse University in New York, told RFE/RL.
"It sort of puts the war front and center as part of his motive for seeking another term. The fact that they chose to do this makes the connection to the war much more explicit," he said.
Taylor said there had been an expectation that Putin would try to put the war in the background during the campaign and play the role of the "benevolent czar," dishing out pension and other benefit increases ahead of the vote.
But the Kremlin may have decided it cannot totally ignore the war as part the campaign, "so they put it out there very directly in the way it was announced today," Taylor said.
Putin's invasion of Ukraine, now in its 22nd month, has been a disaster for Russia, taking the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers, upending the country's economy, and ruining relations with the West. Putin has outlawed criticism of the war and the armed forces to crush any opposition.
Putin's announcement was prompted by Artyom Zhoga, the speaker of a de facto regional parliament in Ukraine's Russian-occupied Donetsk region, who asked the Russian leader to run in the elections slated for March 17, claiming to be speaking for "all the people" in the Donbas.
"I won't hide it. [I have had] different thoughts at different times," Putin told Zhoga and others gathered around him in an elaborate room inside the Kremlin. "But you are right. Now is such a time when it is necessary to make a decision. I will run for president."
The Russian leader's television appearances are highly choreographed and the announcement was no exception.
"Everyone knew this was coming and the only questions were when and how exactly the announcement would be made," Taylor told RFE/RL.
"Usually, things like this don’t happen by accident in Russian politics," he said.
Aside from Zhoga, Putin was surrounded by a teacher, doctor, soldier, and a miner -- the heart of his constituency -- when he made the comment. They all requested he run, saying they were "together with Putin."
Putin's statement came one day after Russia's upper house of parliament, the Federation Council, set the date for the election. The Central Election Commission (TsIK) later announced that the vote will last for three days -- from March 15 to March 17.
Russian elections are tightly controlled by the Kremlin and are neither free nor fair but are viewed by the government as necessary to convey a sense of legitimacy. They are mangled by the exclusion of opposition candidates, voter intimidation, ballot stuffing, and other means of manipulation.
Last month, Putin signed into law a bill on amendments to the law on presidential elections which restricts coverage of the poll, while also giving the TsIK the right to change the election procedure in territories where martial law has been introduced.
U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby mocked Putin's announcement, suggesting that the result was unlikely to be in doubt.
"Well, that's going to be one humdinger of a horse race, isn't it?" Kirby told reporters when asked about Putin's bid to extend his grip on power. "That's all I've got to say on that."
Putin became eligible to take part in Russia's next two presidential elections after he rammed through constitutional changes in 2020 that paved the way for him remaining in office until 2036.
Putin has been prime minister or president since 1999, slashing democratic norms and freedoms with every new term. If he serves another full term, he would surpass the nearly 30-year reign of Stalin and become Russia's longest-serving leader since Catherine the Great (1762-1796).
Jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny and his supporters have urged Russia's 110 million eligible voters to cast ballots for "any other candidate" even though "the final results will be rigged."
"[Putin] will destroy Russia. He has to leave," Navalny wrote in a blog post.
No serious challenger is expected to emerge as two of the country's best-known opposition voices, Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza, are both in prison serving lengthy sentences that they and their supporters say are politically motivated.
Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, 79, a perennial candidate who consistently loses, has announced his intention to run. So, too, has former State Duma Deputy Boris Nadezhdin, 60; a former military leader of Kremlin-backed separatists in Donetsk, Igor Strelkov (Girkin), 52; and Yekaterina Duntsova, 40, a jailed journalist from Rzhev.
Candidates must meet certain criteria and can easily be disqualified by the Kremlin-controlled TsIK for any number of reasons.
Taylor said Putin likely won't allow a challenger who is much younger than himself because "the contrast will be too stark."
The Kremlin is seeking to ensure Putin wins with more than 80 percent of the vote, the online news outlets Meduza and Verstka have reported. Putin won with 77 percent of the vote in 2018, the highest of his four victories.
Taylor, who called the election results a "foregone conclusion," said the Kremlin faces a struggle in trying to achieve both a high voter turnout and a landslide victory for Putin.
The higher the turnout, the more manipulation that will likely be required.
"They want to make it look like it is an election. They want to make it look like Putin’s support is completely genuine and overwhelming. Those things work at cross purposes. If they want an overwhelming response, then it becomes less genuine. So that is the dance they have to do over the next three months," he said.
The election will also be held in what Russia calls its new territories: four regions of Ukraine that Moscow claims to have annexed last year after launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
While Russia claims the regions -- Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhya -- it only partially controls them, and Kyiv has pledged to retake the annexed territories.