President Vladimir Putin won a record 88% in Russia's presidential election on Sunday, exit polls and first results showed, cementing his grip on power, though thousands of opponents staged a symbolic noon protest at polling stations.
The early result means Putin, who came to power in 1999, looks to have easily won a new six-year term that would enable him to overtake Josef Stalin and become Russia's longest-serving leader for more than 200 years.
Putin won 87.8% of the vote, the highest ever result in Russia's post-Soviet history, an exit poll by pollster FOM showed. The Russian Public Opinion Research Centre (VCIOM) put Putin on 87%. First official results indicated the polls were accurate.
The election comes just over two years since Putin triggered the deadliest European conflict since World War Two by ordering the invasion of Ukraine. He casts it as a "special military operation".
War has hung over the three-day election: Ukraine has repeatedly attacked oil refineries in Russia, shelled Russian regions and sought to pierce Russian borders with proxy forces - a move Putin said would not be left unpunished.
While Putin's re-election is not in doubt given his control over Russia and the absence of any real challengers, the former KGB spy wanted to show that he has the overwhelming support of Russians. Several hours before polls closed at 1800 GMT, the nationwide turnout surpassed 2018 levels of 67.5%.
Supporters of Putin's most prominent opponent Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison last month, had called on Russians to come out at a "Noon against Putin" protest to show their dissent against a leader they cast as a corrupt autocrat.
There was no independent tally of how many of Russia's 114 million voters took part in the opposition demonstrations, amid extremely tight security involving tens of thousands of police and security officials.
Reuters journalists saw an increase in the flow of voters, especially younger people, at noon at polling stations in Moscow, St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, with queues of several hundred people and even thousands.
Some said they were protesting, though there were few outward signs to distinguish them from ordinary voters.
As noon arrived across Asia and Europe, crowds hundreds strong gathered at polling stations at Russian diplomatic missions. Navalny's widow, Yulia, appeared at the Russian embassy in Berlin to cheers and chants of "Yulia, Yulia".
Exiled Navalny supporters broadcast footage on YouTube of protests inside Russia and abroad.
"Putin's task is now to imprint his worldview indelibly into the minds of the Russian political establishment" to ensure a like-minded successor, Nikolas Gvosdev, director of the National Security Program at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, told the Russia Matters project.
"For a US administration that hoped Putin's Ukraine adventure would be wrapped up by now with a decisive setback to Moscow’s interests, the election is a reminder that Putin expects that there will be many more rounds in the geopolitical boxing ring."
Russia's election comes at what Western spy chiefs say is a crossroads for the Ukraine war and the wider West in what Biden casts as a 21st Century struggle between democracies and autocracies.
Support for Ukraine is tangled in US domestic politics ahead of the November presidential election pitting President Joe Biden against his predecessor Donald Trump, whose Republican party in Congress has blocked military aid for Kyiv.
Though Kyiv recaptured territory after the invasion in 2022, Russian forces have lately made gains after a failed Ukrainian counter-offensive last year.
The Biden administration fears Putin could grab a bigger slice of Ukraine unless Kyiv gets more support soon. CIA Director William Burns has said that could embolden China.
Putin says the West is engaged in a hybrid war against Russia and that Western intelligence and Ukraine are trying to disrupt the elections.
Voting also took place in Crimea, which Moscow took from Ukraine in 2014, and four other Ukrainian regions it partly controls and has claimed since 2022. Kyiv regards the election on occupied territory as illegal and void.
