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The 71-year-old president is all but certain to win another term in a vote that begins on March 15.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is all but certain to win his fifth election.
But according to the 2020 constitutional amendment that “nullified” his previous terms, the March 15-17 election is going to be his “first”.
Putin announced his candidacy in December during a choreographed ceremony in a lavishly decorated Kremlin hall when talking to a separatist “colonel” from the southeastern Ukrainian region of Donbas.
“On behalf of all of our people, our Donbas, the lands that reunited [with Russia], I wanted to ask you to take part in this election,” Artyom Zhoga, clad in an impeccable uniform adorned with medals, told Putin.
“I’m not going to hide it, I’ve had different thoughts at different times, but now is the time to make a decision, and I will run,” poker-faced Putin replied.
How many terms has Putin served?
He has served four. He was elected president in 2000 and re-elected in 2004, 2012, and 2018.
If he wins, as expected, he will serve another six years, thanks to constitutional amendments that have expanded the term. This would mark his fifth term.
He can then be re-elected again in 2030 for a sixth term.
That means he could be in power until 2036, when he will be 83 years old.
The 71-year-old ex-KGB spy is already Russia’s longest-serving leader since Soviet leader Josef Stalin.
Putin’s increasingly iron-fisted treatment of opposition, critics and antiwar protesters has been widely compared with Stalin’s “big terror” campaigns.
But to Kremlin loyalists, Putin is a political “genius” who prevented Russia’s disintegration, reigned in billionaire oligarchs and subdued Chechen separatists.
Putin’s supporters also call him a “gatherer of Russian lands”, an honourable sobriquet for Russian princes and czars, for waging the 2008 war on ex-Soviet Georgia, recognising two breakaway Georgian statelets, annexing Crimea in 2014 and parts of four more Ukrainian regions in 2022.
What’s the state of the Russian opposition?
On February 16, Alexey Navalny, Putin’s most outspoken political opponent, died in an Arctic prison in what his family, supporters, and much of the international community claimed was political murder.
Navalny was denied registration in the 2018 presidential election that Putin won with almost 78 percent of the vote.
Two more opposition figures – Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kaza-Murza – have been sentenced to eight-and-a-half years and 25 years in jail, respectively, for their criticism of Putin’s war in Ukraine.
Thousands more – opposition figures, critics and average Russians who posted an antiwar comment online or simply liked or shared one – have faced criminal charges.
Tens of thousands have been arrested, fined or forced out of the country.
In addition, at least a million Russian men fled after the war, especially following the September 2022 announcement of “mobilisation”.
“I’ve got nothing to do with this farce. They wanted me to die, they wanted my son to be an orphan,” Demyan, a 32-year-old web designer who fled to Georgia and then to southern Portugal in late 2022, told Al Jazeera.
Authorities largely do not prevent their exodus. But they adopted a law allowing confiscation of their property for “criticising the special military operation”, the Kremlin’s preferred euphemism for the war in Ukraine.
