The incumbent president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, is running for another term in office in the presidential election due over March 15 and 17, the Central Election Committee has been quoted by the Russian and international press agencies as saying.
According to these sources, both the supporters and opponents of the Kremlin leader are expecting him to win a new 6-year mandate. If Putin completed this mandate he could become the longest-lived Russian leader since the 18th century. A former agent of the Soviet political police, the KGB, and former Prime Minister, Putin got his first mandate as a president in 2000, a designated successor of Russia’s post-soviet president Boris Yeltsin.
In 2008, when the Constitution didn’t allow him a third consecutive mandate, he formally ceded his seat to Dmitri Medvedev, but he remained the strongman of the Russian politics. Since the amended Constitution of 2012 Vladimir Putin has uninterruptedly held the presidential seat of the Russian Federation. His regime has been marked by the bloody reprisals against the breakaway insurrection in Chechnya, the elimination of his domestic opposition, the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2022.
RADIO ROMANIA INTERNATIONAL
