The commission responsible for Russia’s elections, which are considered neither free nor fair, said its online voting system crashed on Friday due to the large number of people trying to vote that way, DPA reported. Agerpres. Earlier, the Office of Military Intelligence (GUR) of Ukraine announced a cyber attack on the Russian online voting system, reports Independent Kyiv.

On the first of three days of voting in Moscow alone, about 500,000 people voted online in the morning, the Central Election Commission reported.

The leadership of Moscow would like to see as large a turnout as possible in order to recognize the vote as legitimate. Officials said turnout reached 24 percent and that 27 million people had voted by Friday evening.

Election observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) were not invited to monitor the vote.

The head of the CEC, Ella Pamfilova, a close friend of Putin, said that more than 333,000 people were watching the elections and that everything was going “normally”.

At the same time, he was forced to admit that there were irregularities in online voting from the beginning. She officially explained the problems to the large number of voters who wanted to vote online, Agerpres reports.

A source in the GUR confirmed to the Kyiv Independent that they tried to disrupt the vote on Friday afternoon, adding: “There are still no elections, no democracy there.”

On Friday, Russian television showed Vladimir Putin voting online on the first day of the presidential election for a new six-year term.

Pressure from employers to get people to vote

The independent election monitoring organization Holos, which faces political persecution in Russia, said no independent observers had been sent.

The Voice spoke of massive election fraud, noting that in many places government officials and employees of large corporations, partly owned by the state, are being pressured to vote.

There were some actions of civil disobedience. At several polling stations across the country, men and women poured paint over ballot boxes to invalidate the ballots inside, according to authorities.

Arsons and several arrests were reported from St. Petersburg and Moscow.

Mykola Bulayev, deputy chairman of the Moscow election commission, said that the protests were “controlled from the outside” and called for increased monitoring of polling stations.

Opponents demand that the ballots be declared invalid

However, the biggest protest is not planned until Sunday.

Opponents of the Kremlin are calling on Russians to show up at the polls at noon and cite the resulting long lines to express their displeasure. They asked voters to invalidate ballots by checking more than one box on each ballot.

Moscow estimates the number of voters in Russia at 114 million, but this figure actually includes 4.5 million people from the occupied parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions. Ukraine qualified voting in these regions as illegal.

In addition, 2 million Russians living in other countries have the right to vote.

Any citizen of the Russian Federation who has reached the age of 18 on the day of voting, can exercise his civil rights and is not in prison on the basis of a court sentence can vote in the elections.

Voting in the vast country with 11 time zones will continue until Sunday evening, when the last polling stations in Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea close at 8:00 p.m. (18:00 GMT).

The first forecasts are expected soon, and more accurate results will not be available until late evening or early Monday morning.

According to the legislation, the final results are established within ten days from the day of voting by the Central Election Commission, TASS reports.

Irony at Putin from the President of the European Council

But they are so predictable that the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, ironically congratulated the head of the Kremlin on his victory in the presidential elections from Friday, reports EFE.

“I would like to congratulate Vladimir Putin on his overwhelming victory in the elections that begin today,” the European official wrote on Friday on the X social network, where he added that the elections were being held “without opposition” and without freedom.

It is almost certain that 71-year-old Russian President Vladimir Putin will win a fifth term. Opinion polls in Russia predict that Putin, who has been in power for almost a quarter of a century, will win more than 80% of the vote. It would be the biggest score he had ever achieved.

Putin has three rivals, which gives the election credibility. But not only do they have no chance, but they also have pro-Kremlin political views and usually show support for Putin.

Candidates who opposed Putin’s war in Ukraine were not admitted.

In this context, although the law provides, the second round of voting will not take place. It must be organized 21 days after the first round, between the first two ranked, if no candidate receives more than half of the votes cast in the primary election. Only a simple majority is needed to win the second round.

In the entire history of presidential elections in the Russian Federation, in only one case – in 1996 – did a second round of voting between Boris Eltsan and Gennady Zyuganov take place to determine the winner.

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