Free Republic

Russian President Vladimir Putin has accused Ukraine of trying to disrupt his country’s presidential election by shelling Russian territory and using 2,500 soldiers to try to pierce Russia’s borders, promising to punish Kyiv for its actions. Polls opened across 11 time zones in Russia on Friday to begin three days of voting with Putin almost certain to secure his fifth term since winning his first election in 2000 with dissent in the country almost completely stifled. The shadow of the Ukraine war fell across the election with what Putin said was repeated shelling of western Russia and an attempt by...

Its latest analysis of the conflict in Ukraine on Monday, however, said that a recent announcement could signal that the Kremlin may have backtracked from this plan out of concern that Nadezhdin might gain too many votes and reduce Putin's margin of victory below levels the Kremlin is willing to accept. The think tank was referring to an announcement on Monday from Russia's electoral authority, the Central Election Commission (CEC), regarding Nadezhdin, which said it discovered a 15 percent error rate in the signatures collected by his campaign. Under electoral rules, error rates must not exceed five percent should a...

A politician bidding to run against Vladimir Putin in Russia's upcoming presidential election described the decision to go to war in Ukraine as a "big mistake" in comments to the wives of soldiers on Thursday. Boris Nadezhdin, representing a centre-right party called Civic Initiative that has no seats in parliament, is seeking to gather the necessary 100,000 signatures from people across Russia to enable him to stand against Putin. -snip- Nadezhdin has promised to present a plan for ending the conflict. Last week he also aimed sharp criticism at the authorities over heating outages that have struck parts of Russia...