Voting in the Russian presidential election began this morning and will end Sunday. At that point, Putin's victory will be announced and he will start his 5th term as president. The vote tally doesn't really matter. It will be whatever the Kremlin decides it should be. Having killed off his only two real opponents in the past year, Navalny and Prigozhin, he probably feels like he earned it.

The presidential vote in Russia, which began Friday and lasts through Sunday, features the trappings of a horse race but is more of a predetermined, Soviet-style referendum.

President Vladimir V. Putin, 71, will undoubtedly win a fifth term, with none of the three other candidates who are permitted on the ballot presenting a real challenge. The main opposition figure who worked to spoil the vote, Aleksei A. Navalny, a harsh critic of Mr. Putin and the Ukraine war, died in an Arctic prison last month...

Two candidates opposed to the war were disqualified. A veteran politician, Boris Nadezhdin, alarmed the Putin administration when tens of thousands of people across Russia lined up to sign petitions required for him to run. The Kremlin invalidated enough signatures to bar him.

This time around it will be even easier to manipulate the vote. Russia has introduced online voting and also, will accept votes from the annexed portions of Ukraine. There will of course be no way to verify any of those votes since the region is a war zone.

“The results have been announced in advance,” said Nikolai Rybakov, chairman of Russia’s liberal political party Yabloko, which decided not to join the race this year. “It’s painful, unpleasant and shameful but you have to admit that you can’t influence the results right now,” he said in a phone interview from Moscow this week.

“We see that people have an internal demand for peace and changes for the better. But it’s hard for people to resist the ever-present propaganda of hate and anti-Westernism. And on the other hand, people see what criticism of the government can lead to,” he added. “People are afraid for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, and you can’t blame them.”

No doubt many are afraid and recognize that they have no choice and no way to protest without risking prison, but it's also fair to say that Putin has some real support.

Nina Kisileva, 90, told NBC News as she exited the station that she came out early to vote for another six years of Putin. “Because I trust him. I really trust him,” Kisileva said, adding that she has lived through a slew of Soviet leaders, including Josef Stalin. “I remember when Stalin died, his funeral in 1953, I remember it well. And now I trust only Putin,” she said.

Svetlana Kulikova said she voted at the station electronically, an option for the first time this year.

Like Kisileva, she said she also voted for Putin. “We live well, we are satisfied with everything and, well, we are very satisfied with our president,” Kulikova, 59, said.

Denis Babushkin, who works in highway construction, said that Putin was the only “adequate” candidate out of the four, so he voted for him. “He is the only person who has made others respect Russia as a country recently,” said Babushkin, 39. While he said he was not happy about everything going on in the country, he said the positives still outweigh the negatives.

The head of the European Council posted his mock congratulations earlier today (which suggested my headline). 

Would like to congratulate Vladimir Putin on his landslide victory in the elections starting today.

No opposition.
No freedom.
No choice.

— Charles Michel (@CharlesMichel) March 15, 2024

Putin is 71-years-old and this preordained victory gives him six more years.

Finally, yesterday the Telegraph highlighted this very creepy Russian ad to promote voting. The text is relatively bland but the director seems to have understood this was part of a horror movie.