On Friday, Russians started voting in the presidential elections, the results of some of them are known. But Kremlin elites say that Vladimir Putin became the absolute master of the country not only thanks to the suppression of any form of opposition in Russia, Reuters reports.

Putin, a former lieutenant colonel in the KGB, the Soviet Union’s notorious security service, enjoys widespread support in the country during the war in Ukraine, where Moscow’s propaganda has been at work since it began. so-called “special military operations”.

“I support Putin and of course I will vote for him,” Lyudmila Petrova, a 46-year-old Muscovite, told Reuters when approached by reporters from an international news agency in a market south of the Russian capital. fake New Balance sneakers in China.

“Putin raised Russia from its knees. And Russia will defeat the West and Ukraine. You can’t even beat Russia, ever. Are you Westerners out of your mind? What do you have to do with Ukraine?” the woman also told Reuters journalists.

In the West, Putin is seen as an autocrat, a war criminal, a leader who orders the killing of rivals and, as US President Joe Biden said last month, a “crazy scumbag” who Washington says runs a corrupt dictatorship that rules Russia. destroy.

But based on public opinion polls and several interviews with sources close to the authorities in Moscow, Reuters notes that in Russia, the war has helped Putin consolidate power and increase his popularity among the people.

Russian elites see Vladimir Putin as president for life

“Make no doubt: this is the job of a lifetime,” said a Reuters source familiar with the thinking at the highest level of Moscow’s political leadership. He agreed to speak to Reuters on condition of anonymity to express his views on political issues.

“Putin has no competitors. He is on a completely different level. The West made a very serious mistake by helping to unite a large part of Russian elites and the population around Putin through sanctions and the demonization of Russia,” the source said.

Another senior official told Reuters that the policy does not threaten Putin’s power, only depending on his health, which appears robust. This source said that Putin also has no obvious successor, despite speculation that it could be Mykola Patrushev, head of the Moscow Security Council and the Kremlin’s foreign policy ideologue, or Dmitry Medvedev.

Putin presents the war in Ukraine to Russians as part of an existential battle against a declining “decadent” West, but which he also blames for Russia’s humiliation after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Russia’s encirclement, expansion into countries that were part of Moscow’s sphere of influence.

These propaganda themes resonate with many Russians, who are suspicious of Western intentions, even if they are fans of Western products.

Selfie on Red Square (PHOTO: Mykola Vynokurov / Alamy / Profimedia Images)

The idea of ​​a war against the “collective West” is popular among Russians

Kremlin leaders, sometimes wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Putin’s Team”, openly talk about war against NATO. Putin’s approval rating in Russia now stands at 86%, up from 71% just before the war.

Both surveys were conducted by the reliable sociological company “Levada Center”.

The Kremlin leader’s popularity also soared after he invaded Georgia in 2008, then moved his troops into Crimea in 2014 and then annexed the Ukrainian peninsula in a sham referendum.

Russian television and the sophisticated propaganda apparatus operating on social media available in Russia portray Putin as a strong patriot and deride Western leaders like Joe Biden as weak, reckless and slanderous.

“For many Russians, who are inspired partly by propaganda, but, most importantly, by their own inner convictions, Russia has been fighting with the West since ancient times, and what is happening now is an episode of this struggle,” says Oleksiy Levinson, director of sociocultural research at the Levada Center.

“Those who express such beliefs in our polls see themselves in a certain way as participants in this struggle against the West. They are like fans of a football team who imagine themselves as participants in the match,” he adds.

The death of Yevgeny Prigozhin sent a clear message to Russia

Although some Russian elites are skeptical of the way the war is being waged in Ukraine, they have nothing to gain and everything to lose by opposing the Kremlin, as the failed uprising by Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner’s former mercenary leader, demonstrated.

The plane crash that killed Prigozhin occurred exactly two months after his mercenaries fled to Moscow and on the same day that General Serhii Surovykin, the former commander of the Russian invasion forces, was also “beheaded” on suspicion of supporting the rebellion.

Putin leaves little to chance. Since the beginning of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian authorities have intensified repression against opposition forces in order to suppress any form of dissent.

Hundreds of people were arrested for expressing opposition to Putin’s regime and the war, and all protests were banned.

Russian state media, which dominates the ratings, is fiercely loyal to Putin.

The task of his three opponents in the presidential elections is to lose. None of them polled more than 6% of voters.

An election committee official told Boris Nadezhdin, an anti-war candidate who was disqualified from the election, to focus on his own failures and not complain about the country’s leadership.

The main concern of the Kremlin during the elections is to ensure a high voter turnout.

Russians can vote in parks and other unusual places in presidential elections (PHOTO: AA / Abaca Press / Profimedia Images)

Presidential elections with a song in Russia

Six separate sources told Reuters that some executives at Russian state-owned companies ordered their employees to go to the polls and take photos of the ballot to prove it. Even ATMs were modified to remind Russians to go to the polls.

The leaders of the fragmented Russian opposition are either abroad, in prison, or dead. The most famous opponent of Vladimir Putin, Alexei Navalny, died on February 16 in the infamous “Polar Wolf” colony in Siberia.

His widow, Yulia Navalna, urged Russians to go to the polls on Sunday night to show their opposition to Putin in a concerted gesture.

Her husband described Putin’s Russia as a weak criminal state run by thieves, sycophants and spies who only care about money. Years ago, he predicted that Russia could face major political upheaval, including the possibility of a revolution to topple Putin.

Asked whether Putin is strong or weak, Leonid Volkov, one of Navalny’s closest associates and former chief of his office, said that “the dinosaurs were very strong before they disappeared.”

Nobel laureate condemns Russia’s return to “dystopia”

Shortly after he made the comments in an interview with Reuters in Vilnius, Volkov was attacked with a hammer outside his home in the Lithuanian capital. Lithuanian authorities say preliminary results of an investigation into the attack show it was professional and “well-planned”.

The Kremlin refused to comment on the incident, but said that President Putin should be “respected and listened to.”

Oleg Orlov, a veteran of the human rights movement in Russia, told the court that last month sentenced him to two and a half years in prison for “discrediting the armed forces” that Putin’s Russia looks like something out of a novel by Franz Kafka or Vladimir Sorokin, the Russian postmodernist writer .

“Those who have led our country into the pit it is now represent the old, the decrepit, the obsolete,” he said.

“They have no sense of the future, only false images of the past, only mirages of ‘imperial grandeur.’ And they are pushing Russia back into the past, back into dystopia,” said Orlov, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.