Putin sealed his control over Russia for six more years on Monday with a highly orchestrated landslide in an election that followed the harshest crackdown on the opposition and free speech since Soviet times.
Partial results showed Putin winning 87 per cent of the votes in a contest without any serious opposition, extending his rule by six years surpassing that of Joseph Stalin. Other countries said the vote was neither free nor fair due to the imprisonment of political opponents and censorship.
The foreign ministry said in a statement it would look out for what it called "subversive actions and the spread of information" related to the election and what the Kremlin calls its special military operation in Ukraine.
Pevchikh did not name the two US nationals in contention to be swapped along with Navalny. But the United States has said it is trying to return Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Paul Whelan, a former US Marine.
The stunning news — less than a month before an election that will give Putin another six years in power — brought renewed criticism and outrage directed at the Kremlin leader who has cracked down on all opposition at home.
A fierce critic of Putin's war policies, Boris Nadezhdin said the Russian president had made a “fatal mistake by starting the special military operation” in Ukraine. His campaign garnered attention, but was expected to falter as another anti-war candidate was disqualified from the elections earlier.
Nadezhdin last week presented the electoral commission with signatures from more than 1,00,000 supporters but the commission said its initial analysis of the signatures showed some of those listed as Nadezhdin supporters were dead people.
Attacks led by the Ukraine army are dealing a heavy blow to President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to reassure Russians that life in the country is largely untouched by the nearly 2-year-old war.
His lawyers said that for three days in a row, Navalny’s lawyers spent hours at the penal colony waiting for permission to visit him, only to be turned away at the last minute. Letters to the politician were not being delivered, and he didn’t appear at scheduled court hearings via video link.
Moscow, November 27: Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been formally nominated by the ruling United Russia party to run for President in next March's election.Mr. Putin, who stepped down in 2008 after two Presidential terms
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