CNN
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The polls are now closed across Russia, but the outcome was never in doubt: Russian President Vladimir Putin has secured a fifth term in office through a dubious national plebiscite.
But Russia’s three-day presidential vote was never about democratic procedure. For the Kremlin, a resounding first-round win will give the incumbent a fresh stamp of legitimacy and sends a clear message: Putin’s war on Ukraine has the full backing of his people.
In an address to the Russian people on the eve of the election, Putin urged voters to cast ballots as a show of national unity.
“I am convinced that you understand what a difficult period our country is going through now, what difficult challenges we face in almost all spheres,” he said. “And in order to continue to respond to them with dignity and successfully overcome difficulties, we continue to need to be united and self-confident.”
The people of Russia, Putin added, “are one big family!”
That’s a message Putin repeated after polls closed. In an appearance with a crowd of youthful campaign activists wearing shirts with a logo reading “Putin Russia Victory,” the Russian president said Russians “are all one team, all [the] Russian citizens that came to the polls to vote.”
But Putin also alluded vaguely to “a lot of tasks ahead of us” following his re-election.
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In the run-up to the vote, Putin had been coy about what those tasks might be exactly if he secured a fifth presidential term.
In a generally anodyne interview with government propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov, Putin evaded speculation about whether, for instance, a government shake-up might be expected after the election.
Asked if the government of Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin might survive post-election, Putin merely said, “We need to talk about this after the elections, after the votes are counted. It seems to me that now this is simply incorrect. But on the whole, the government is working … quite satisfactorily.”
So far, so yawn. But a bigger question now looms for Russia: What really comes next?
Will there be a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the Kremlin ship of state? And what are the actual tasks at hand for a re-elected Putin?
Among Russia-watchers, some speculation has centered on a few big-picture issues. For starters, if the presidential vote is indeed a referendum on Russia’s war, does the election give Putin a free hand to continue in Ukraine as he sees fit?
On that count, Putin does seem to have room for maneuver. The Russian president is projecting confidence about developments on the battlefield, particularly after the fall of the eastern Ukrainian towns of Bakhmut and Avdiivka. And with Western dithering about continued aid to Ukraine – particularly in the US Congress, where a crucial aid package to Kyiv remains held up – the election result gives him more rhetorical ammunition.
In his pre-election interview with Kiselyov, Putin trotted out that just that talking point.
“To negotiate now just because they are running out of ammunition is somehow ridiculous on our part,” he said, projecting confidence about Ukraine being on the back foot.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin attends the Navy Day Parade in St. Petersburg in July 2022.
Archivio GBB/Redux
A 6-year-old Putin poses for a picture with his mother, Maria Putina, in 1958. He was born on October 7, 1952, in St. Petersburg, then known as Leningrad.
Russian Archives via ZUMA Press Wire
At age 13, Putin and other students pose for a class photo. He is seen in the first row, third from right.
Archivio GBB/Redux
Putin grew up in a communal apartment shared by three families.
Laski Diffusion/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Putin dances with a classmate during a party in St. Petersburg in 1970.
Russian Archives via ZUMA Press Wire
Putin, bottom, wrestles at school in St. Petersburg in 1971.
Archivio GBB/Redux
Putin joined the KGB in 1975 and was first assigned to shadow foreign visitors.
Laski Diffusion/Newsmakers/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Putin poses for a photograph with his parents, Maria and Vladimir, in 1985. It was just before his departure to Germany, where he was assigned to counterintelligence duties.
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Putin turned toward politics in 1991 and became an adviser to one of his law school mentors, Anatoly Sobchak, who was running for mayor of St. Petersburg. The two are seen here during a ceremony in 1992.
Russian Archives via ZUMA Press Wire
Putin poses for a picture with his wife, Lyudmila, and daughters, Yekaterina and Maria. The couple married in 1983 and divorced in 2014.
AFP/Getty Images
Russian President Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin prime minister in 1999. Here, Putin hand Yeltsin flowers during a farewell ceremony at the Kremlin in Moscow in December 1999. Amid a scandal Yeltsin had announced he was resigning immediately and that Putin would run the country as acting president until elections in March 2000.
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Putin sets a flower on a tomb during his inauguration ceremony in May 2000 at the Kremlin in Moscow. He was sworn in as Russia's second democratically elected president.
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Putin dances with a young girl in Kazan, Russia, while taking part in midsummer festivities in June 2000.
Reuters
Cuban leader Fidel Castro chats with Putin at the top of the steps of Havana's Palace of the Revolution during Putin's official welcoming ceremony in December 2000. Putin was on a four-day official visit to Cuba, the first by a Russian leader since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
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Putin listens to a question during a joint press conference with US President George W. Bush at the White House in November 2001.
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President Bush welcomes Putin upon his arrival at Camp David in 2003.
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Putin rides a horse during a vacation in Southern Siberia in August 2009.
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Putin meets with a victim of a terrorist attack at a Moscow hospital in March 2010. Two suicide bombers blew themselves up on packed metro trains in Moscow, killing dozen of people.
Mikhail Metzel/AP
Putin judges an arm wrestling match while visiting the Seliger youth educational forum in Russia's Tver region in August 2011.
Ivan Sekretarev/AP
During a rally in Moscow, tears run down Putin's face after he was elected president for a third term in March 2012.
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Putin and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev clink glasses in the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow in June 2012 during a reception marking the patriotic Russia Day holiday to celebrate the country's 1990 declaration of independence from Soviet rule.
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Putin plays with his dogs Yume, left, and Buffy at his home in Novo-Ogaryovo, Russia, in March 2013.
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A topless demonstrator with a message on her back walks toward Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Hanover, Germany, in April 2013.
Dmitry Astakhov/ITAR-TASS/Landov
From left, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach, Putin and Medvedev look at their watches before the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics in February 2014. Russia hosted the Olympics that year.
Sergei Ilnitsky/AP
Putin shakes hands with Speaker of Crimean legislature Vladimir Konstantinov, second from left, and Sevastopol mayor Alexei Chalyi as Crimean Premier Sergei Aksyonov looks on in March 2014. Putin had just signed a treaty to incorporate Crimea into Russia.
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Putin is seen through a video camera's viewfinder as he speaks during his annual news conference in Moscow in December 2014.
Mykola Lazarenko/AP
From left, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Putin, Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko gather in Minsk, Belarus, in February 2015. Leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany were gathering for crucial talks in the hope of negotiating an end to the fighting between Russia-backed separatists and government forces in eastern Ukraine.
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US President Barack Obama and Putin toast during a luncheon hosted by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon during the 70th annual UN General Assembly in 2015.
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Putin pays his respects to slain Russian Ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov during the funeral ceremony at the Russian Foreign Ministry in Moscow in December 2016. Karlov was assassinated in Turkey by an off-duty policeman.
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Putin hands US President Donald Trump a World Cup football during a joint press conference after their 2018 summit in Helsinki, Finland. The two leaders met one-on-one and discussed a range of issues, including the 2016 US election.
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Putin and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman attend the G20 summit in Buenos Aires in November 2018.
Eliot Blondet/Pool/SIPA/Shutterstock
French President Emmanuel Macron, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Putin meet in Paris in December 2019.
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A security officer asks the media to step back at the start of a summit between US President Joe Biden and Putin in June 2021. Seated from left are US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Biden, Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The summit, held in Geneva, Switzerland, was the first meeting of Biden and Putin since Biden was elected president.
SPUTNIK/AFP/Getty Images
Putin meets with Macron in Moscow in February 2022. Macron was hoping to de-escalate the tense standoff between Russia and Ukraine. At the time, Putin had assembled 70% of the military personnel and weapons it would need for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, based on US intelligence estimates.
Sergey Ponomarev/The New York Times/Redux
A family that left eastern Ukraine watches Putin's televised address from a hotel room in Taganrog, Russia, in February 2022. In lengthy remarks, Putin blasted Kyiv's growing security ties with the West and appeared to cast doubt on Ukraine's right to self-determination. He would soon order troops into separatist-held parts of eastern Ukraine.
Russian pool via AP
In this image taken from video, Putin pays his respects near the coffin of former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev at the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow in September 2022.
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Putin meets with the Moscow-appointed heads of four Ukrainian regions, partially occupied by Russia, at the Grand Kremlin Palace in September 2022. In defiance of international law, Putin announced Russia would annex four Ukrainian regions as Russian territory: Luhansk and Donetsk — home to two Russian-backed breakaway republics where fighting has been ongoing since 2014 — as well as Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, two areas in southern Ukraine that have been occupied by Russian forces since shortly after the invasion began.
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Putin is seen on a screen as he addresses a rally and concert in Moscow marking the annexation of the four regions of Ukraine in September 2022.
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Putin speaks with his Belarus counterpart Alexander Lukashenko during a meeting at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg in December 2022.
Pavel Byrkin/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images
Putin sees off Chinese President Xi Jinping after a reception following their talks at the Kremlin in Moscow in March 2023.
Pavel Bednyakov/Sputnik via AP
Putin is seen on monitors as he addresses the nation after Yevgeny Prigozhin, the chief of private mercenary group Wagner, called for an armed rebellion in June 2023. Putin vowed to punish those behind the "armed uprising." Later the Belarusian government claimed President Alexander Lukashenko had
reached a deal with Prigozhin to halt the advance. The Kremlin said criminal charges against Prigozhin will be dropped and he will be sent to neighboring Belarus.
Getty Images
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, left, and Putin visit the construction site of a rocket launch complex in Tsiolkovsky, Russia, in September 2023.
Kim and Putin met at the Vostochny Cosmodrome, in Russia's far east, as both countries face international isolation over Moscow's invasion of Ukraine and Pyongyang's nuclear weapons and ballistic missile program. Putin has said Russia is considering and discussing some military cooperation with North Korea.
Tucker Carlson Network/Zuma Press
Maxim Shemetov/Reuters
Putin speaks at a press conference after partial election results indicated he would
win another term in March 2024, extending his rule until at least 2030. With most opposition candidates either dead, jailed, exiled or barred from running -- and with dissent effectively outlawed in Russia since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 -- Putin faced no credible challenge to his presidency.
Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP
Vladimir Putin walks to take his
oath as Russian president during an inauguration ceremony in the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow, Russia, on May 7, 2024.
But Russia’s incremental advances in eastern Ukraine have come at horrific human cost. Speculation persists that Putin and his generals may need to launch a fresh round of post-election mobilization to feed troops into the meat grinder.
Following initial Russian setbacks in the attempt to encircle Ukraine from three sides and capture Kyiv, Putin announced a partial mobilization in September 2022. But Russia remains locked in a war of attrition along a 1,000-kilometer front. Some observers believe Putin would have to wait until after the election to take the potentially unpopular step of another big call-up.
And regardless of how Putin addresses his country’s manpower problem, there is another likely item on the agenda. The crackdown on Russia’s domestic opposition – what’s left of it – can continue unabated.
In remarks following the closing of polls across Russia, Putin made an unusual move: He mentioned the unmentionable, the name of late Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny.
Putin has long made a habit of not mentioning Navalny, who died last month in a Russian prison north of the Arctic Circle. But in response to a question about Navalny’s death and the exclusion of opposition voices during the election campaign, Putin broke protocol to call Navalny’s death a “sad event,” but dismissed a question about the fairness of the elections by changing the subject, a favorite Putin information tactic.
“As for Mr. Navalny, yes he passed away – it is always a sad event,” Putin said. “And there were other cases when people in prisons passed away. Didn’t this happen in the United States? It did, and not once.”
That might suggest Putin thinks he is on safe ground. But whataboutism is not necessarily a sign of confidence.
Predicting Putin’s post-election course of action is a tricky business. The Russian leader has for the short term sanction-proofed his economy; his ammunition factories are outproducing the US and its European allies and the political landscape has been cleared of all competition.
But war is always unpredictable. And whatever Putin’s efforts to spin things in his favor, Russia’s longer-term problems – demographic decline, the cost of war and sanctions, and the inherent brittleness of one-man rule – are not likely to disappear before Putin stands for a sixth term in office.