Vladimir Putin has won Russia's presidential election with 87.97% of the vote, according to the first official results showed on Sunday after polls closed.
The vote is taking place against the backdrop of the harshest crackdown on political opposition and freedom of speech in Russia since Soviet times.
Only three token candidates — and no one who opposes his war in Ukraine — were allowed to run against him as he sought a fifth term.
Russia's Central Election Commission says Putin has 87.97% of the vote with 24.4% of the precincts counted.
The White House said the elections were “obviously not free nor fair”, while Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky said Putin wanted to rule forever.
The early result means Putin, who came to power in 1999, looks to have easily won a new six-year term that would enable him to overtake Josef Stalin and become Russia's longest-serving leader for more than 200 years.The vote comes only weeks after the death of Putin's fiercest political foe, Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison.
Other potential opponents have been jailed or exiled and independent monitoring of the election is extremely limited.Navalny's associates urged those unhappy with Putin or the war to protest by coming to the polls at noon on Sunday — and lines outside a number of polling stations both inside Russia and at its embassies around the world appeared to swell at that time.
Among those heeding call was his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who joined a long line at the Russian Embassy in Berlin as some in the crowd applauded and chanted her name.She spent more than five hours in the line and told reporters after casting her vote she wrote her late husband's name on the ballot.Asked whether she had a message for Putin, Navalnaya replied: "Please stop asking for messages from me or from somebody for Mr. Putin. There could be no negotiations and nothing with Mr. Putin, because he's a killer, he's a gangster."
