Putin on track for win as polls open

But Putin, 65, used a Kremlin meeting with the candidates he soundly defeated in Sunday’s election to signal his desire to focus on domestic, not global, matters, and to try to raise living standards by investing more in education, infrastructure and health while reducing defence spending.

Four years ago on March 18, Russian Federation annexed Crimea.

French far-right politician Marine Le Pen’s National Front party has congratulated Mr Putin, hailing the election as a sign of Russia’s “stability and democratic foundations”.

Britain and Russian Federation are also locked in a diplomatic dispute over the spy poisoning incident, and Washington is eyeing new sanctions on Moscow over allegations it interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, something Russian Federation flatly denies.

Rising tensions with the West over the poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal in Britain, and new sanctions from Washington over alleged election meddling, strengthen the impression of a Russian Federation at loggerheads with the rest of the world.

Tsiya Soskina, a 78-year-old retiree in Yekaterinburg, said she did not go to vote because “they’re going to decide everything for me anyway”. “They once again started piling pressure on us when we needed to mobilise”. “That’s Putin’s main quality – he is at the core of our state”.

Sunday’s election was the first presidential vote on the Crimean peninsula since Moscow annexed the territory from Ukraine in 2014, prompting a further decline in Russia’s relations with the West.

President Vladimir Putin is now set to lead Russian Federation, until 2024 after a landslide victory.

Putin’s Kremlin-approved challengers include millionaire communist Pavel Grudinin and former reality TV host Ksenia Sobchak, but none was expected to win more than eight percent.

If Putin serves to the end of his new fourth term, which expires in 2024, he would become the longest-serving leader of Russian Federation since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

State-run pollsters predict Putin will take just under 70 percent of the vote, with the independent Levada Centre – branded a “foreign agent” – barred from releasing any research related to the election.

Their victories have been possible because numerous people they rule will have never known true freedom, while others will yearn for the days when they never had to want for a job or a meal, however meager.

“If they want to express their disapproval, then they don’t turn out”. Some see Sobchak, the daughter of Putin’s one-time patron, as a Kremlin project meant to add a democratic veneer to the vote and help split the ranks of Kremlin critics.

The higher the support for Putin in Sunday’s vote, “the tougher the system” Russians will face in his new term, Sobchak told reporters after voting.

Putin recorded his best election performance with 76.67 per cent of the vote.

Voting will run until polls close at the westernmost point of Russian Federation, the Kaliningrad region on the Baltic Sea.

He said – tongue in cheek – it had created a “turnout we couldn’t have dreamt of ourselves”.

Mr Putin – who was first became President in December 1999 – did not run in 2008 because of term limits, but was appointed prime minister, a role in which he was widely seen as leader.