Sunday is the last day of voting in Russia for the presidential election, which is expected to give a new six-year mandate to Vladimir Putin. More than half of the voters went to the polls in the first two days, marked by sporadic incidents, but mostly by drone attacks on Russian territory, attributed to Ukraine. A new attack on a refinery in southern Russia was reported on Sunday in Krasnodar, with regional authorities saying it was caused by a fire and that one person died of cardiac arrest. All week there have been such attacks, and President Putin has warned that Kyiv’s attempts to disrupt the electoral process will not go unpunished. The team of the deceased leader of the Russian opposition, Alexei Navalny, informed that, on Sunday, there were several protests against the predictable re-election of the acting president Vladimir Putin. In Russia’s Far East, in Vladivostok, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Irkutsk and other Siberian cities, people took part in the „Noon Against Putin” at lunchtime, Navalny’s team reported in a live broadcast on YouTube. At the same time, listening to the call of Putin’s opponents, hundreds of people queued at the same hour at a polling station in Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains. Other Putin opponents, such as the exiled Russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who lives in the United Kingdom, called on people not to be afraid and to take part in the campaign.
Eugen Cojocariu, RADIO ROMÂNIA INTERNAȚIONAL
