Putin’s Russia Is Barely Pretending Its Elections Are Real

With no end to the war in sight, U.S. intelligence estimates that 315,000 Russian troops have so far been killed or injured in fighting, as of Dec. 12, 2023. The Ukrainian government does not release casualty tolls, but Washington reported in August 2023 that the number of Ukrainian combatant deaths likely stands around 70,000. The U.N. approximates that more than 10,000 Ukrainian civilians have died.

Elections to Watch in 2024: This story is part of a package on 15 key elections this year (besides the United States). Read the full analysis here. 

Nearly two years into the conflict, the Russian economy has weathered punitive Western sanctions surprisingly well. That’s in part because many countries of the global south have been reluctant to join what they see as a Cold War redux between the United States and Russia—and are upset about hypocrisy in Washington’s selective condemnation of Russia’s alleged wartime abuses versus, say, Israel’s.

President Vladimir Putin’s approval rating is at a sky-high 85 percent as of November 2023, according to the Levada Center, a reliable independent Russian pollster. The center cites public opinion surrounding Putin’s so-called “special military operation” and the “conflict” in Ukraine—the Kremlin has warned it will block websites that use the term “war” or “invasion.”

Putin, a staple of Russian politics for the past quarter century, likely needs no introduction in the pages of Foreign Policy. Yet it bears repeating that domestic office and global notoriety are nothing new to Putin. Now an indicted criminal by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in Ukraine, Putin began his career as an intelligence operative for the Soviet-era KGB before taking office as president in 2000. He has been in power nearly continuously since then, with a brief four-year stint as prime minister from 2008 to 2012 due to term limits. (Loyal apparatchik Dmitry Medvedev served as president during that time.)

Putin’s tenure at Russia’s helm—whether as head of state or head of government—has been marked by a descent into authoritarianism, rampant corruption, and systemic human rights abuses. Independent media has been all but shut down; political opponents are intimidated at best and allegedly poisoned at worst. Putin has battled Chechen separatists domestically and ensnared himself in numerous military campaigns beyond Russia’s borders. Even before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia had annexed the Crimean Peninsula and supported Syria’s Bashar al-Assad with a brutal bombing campaign in Syria. The Kremlin also fought wars in the former Soviet republic of Georgia and counts proxies the world over.

In a sign of how much Russian democracy has regressed under Putin, the president has decided that term limits do not matter in 2024 like they did in 2008. Until recently, Russia’s constitution forbade more than two consecutive six-year presidential terms. (Putin extended a term’s length from four to six years in 2008, effective 2012.) But in 2020, when a member of Putin’s coalition conveniently proposed that the charter be amended to drop this rule, the president was on board. Though it was never in doubt, Putin made his candidacy for a fifth term official in December 2023.

The Russian presidential election will be a three-day affair from March 15 to 17. It is not expected to be free or fair and will almost certainly cement Putin’s stranglehold on the country’s political system. After the last presidential vote in 2018, monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said candidates competed on an “uneven playing field” and that, in Russia, “elections almost lose their purpose.” That year, in a flex of territorial muscle, Russia held votes for the first time on the annexed Crimean Peninsula. This year, Putin intends to extend the presidential contest to the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine.

Technically, Putin has competition. But in practice, no other presidential candidate stands a chance. His main rival, opposition leader Alexei Navalny, is behind bars and banned from running. Another potential contender, ultranationalist Igor Girkin—who has decried Putin’s posture in Ukraine as tepid and called the president “cowardly”—is also in prison. The long list of other politicians who have expressed interest in a run will likely register in the single percentage points.

Despite the bleak circumstances, voter turnout in Russia rivals that of U.S. presidential elections. In the 2018 presidential election, more than 67 percent of eligible Russian voters went to the polls.

The biggest challenge to Putin’s rule is likely already behind him—and it didn’t come at the ballot box. In June 2023, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the paramilitary Wagner Group—a private contractor that had, until then, been seen as doing the Kremlin’s dirty work in military entanglements from Syria to Mali—rebelled against Putin in an armed revolt.

In Foreign Policy, Yale University professor Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon M. Huntsman Jr., and author William F. Browder called the mutiny the “biggest existential threat Putin has faced in his more than 20-year rule.”

Putin quickly quashed the revolt, and Prigozhin has since died in a plane crash, widely believed to have been caused by the Russian government. Former NPR Moscow Bureau Chief Lucian Kim wrote that, in the short-lived Wagner uprising, “the full madness of Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship was on display.” It will be that, too, when Putin extends his presidential mandate even further in March.