Russian Federation claims foreign hackers are trying to interfere with its election

Now, he faces seven challengers but no serious threat to his rule.

Voters cast ballots from the Pacific coast to Siberia and Moscow.

“The administration is confronting and countering malign Russian cyber activity, including their attempted interference in US elections, destructive cyber-attacks, and intrusions targeting critical infrastructure”, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said in a statement on Thursday. Some Russians have reported being pressured by employers to show up and vote.

He said he would “announce in the coming days the measures that we intend to take”. Some examples: ballot boxes being stuffed with extra ballots in multiple regions; an election official assaulting an observer; CCTV cameras obscured by flags or nets from watching ballot boxes; discrepancies in ballot numbers; last-minute voter registration changes likely to boost turnout and a huge pro-Putin board inside a polling station.

Modeled on the President’s Daily Briefing, which the director of national intelligence prepares for the President nearly daily, I am providing a glimpse of the kind of intelligence assessments that are likely to come across the desk of the President of the United States this week.

“If anything, all she really did during this campaign was hurt Navalny”, Pavlovsky said.

About 107 million Russians are eligible to cast ballots, but some analysts say that after 18 years of Putin’s leadership – both as president and prime minister – fatigue may be setting in.

Mr Navalny and his supporters had called for an election boycott but the extent of its success could not immediately be gauged.

Election monitors were reporting irregularities at voting stations across Russian Federation, even though election authorities were under orders to ensure that the voting was free and fair after violations marred Putin’s last election in 2012.

Mr. Putin, 65, has been the most powerful man in Russian Federation since he first became president in 2000, stepping aside once to serve as prime minister to get around term limits.

“What percentage of the vote would you consider for yourself successful?” a journalist asked Putin in a sign of the day’s major drama.

They have also charged her of drawing attention from Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader barred from standing in the election and whose anti-corruption investigations led to nationwide street protests a year ago.

Most people who spoke to AFP said they voted for Putin, praising him for restoring stability and national pride after the humiliating collapse of the USSR.

Critics think Sobchak has the tacit support of the Kremlin so that the election appears more democratic, which she denies. He’s quite popular. On the other hand, the only plausible opposition candidate (who would have been incredibly unlikely to win even in a truly open race) was barred from running.

Commission chairwoman Ella Pamfilova said it was a DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attempt tracked to computers in 15 countries, without naming them. Such attacks are very common.

Voters were casting ballots across the world’s largest country, from the Pacific coast to Siberia and Moscow.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday sloughed off the notion that Russia was behind the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter, saying “any sensible person would understand that this is delirium and nonsense, it is unthinkable that we would do such a thing”.

The Kremlin needs a high turnout to give greater legitimacy to a new mandate for Putin, who is already Russia’s longest-serving leader since Joseph Stalin.