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March 4th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda “I promised you we would win, we won. Glory to Russia!”
His voice hoarse with emotion he added: “We showed that no one and
nothing can tell us what to do. We were able to save ourselves from
political provocations that have just one aim: to overturn the Russian state
and usurp power. Such attempts will not succeed on our land. They won’t
succeed!”
The results of 30 per cent of polling stations showed Mr Putin was on course
to win with 63.42 per cent of the vote. The Communist leader Gennady
Zyuganov was trailing with 17.25 per cent, and the tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov
was third with 7.29 per cent. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a populist candidate,
had 7.19 per cent while the former upper house speaker Sergei Mironov polled
3.72 per cent.
While the result negates the need for a second round – only required if no
candidate gets more than half the vote – it suggests a weakening of support
for Mr Putin, who took 72 per cent when he ran for the presidency in 2004.
Mr Zyuganov said the vote was illegitimate and refused to congratulate Mr
Putin. “I cannot recognise this vote as honest, fair or worthy,”
he said.
Ilya Yashin, one of the leaders of a growing opposition movement which has
brought tens of thousands of Russians to street protests against the regime,
said: “There was a hypothesis that the authorities would this time
allow honest elections in Moscow because of the scandal with violations
during the Duma elections in December, but this is being disproved. The
scale of the falsification we are seeing will destroy the last vestiges of
trust between government and the people. Tomorrow we will be on the streets.”
Several hundred thousand civilian observers monitored the vote as citizens
made their choice at 95,000 stations in regions across 10 time zones.
Mr Putin was expected to win despite being unsettled by mass street protests
against his rule. Opposition is concentrated among the urban middle class,
but he preserves support among provincial voters who praise him for ensuring
stability and higher wages.
However, within hours of polls opening, Twitter and other social media were
flooded with reports of fraud and vote rigging. Golos, Russia’s leading
elections watchdog, said it received numerous reports of “carousel
voting,” a ploy used during the disputed parliamentary poll in December
in which groups of people vote at several different polling stations using
the same absentee ballots.
Many reports of falsifications remain unconfirmed, although bloggers posted
photographs and videos of groups of people arriving simultaneously at
stations to vote.
Vadim Korovin, an opposition activist, claimed he and others had filmed groups
of young people meeting outside a McDonald’s near Yugo Zapadnaya metro
station in southern Moscow and being paid to vote for Mr Putin. “We
caught one of them and told the nearest police station but they refused to
do anything,” he said.
Election monitors had warned that many polling stations had run out of
absentee ballots, indicating they might be used in fraud by Mr Putin’s
supporters, or others. Rosvybory, a coalition of election observers led by
Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption blogger who at 35 is the heart-throb of
the protest movement, said it had recorded up to 4,000 alleged violations of
electoral law during voting by the early evening. More than 150 observers
were reported to have been illegally removed by police or election officials
from polling stations in Moscow.
The city’s election chief, Valentin Gorbunov, denied the reports of carousel
voting and said factories were providing transport for their workers to
polling stations.
The disparate opposition movement will now hold protests in the capital today.
Tens of thousands of people are expected at an opposition rally on Pushkin
Square in central Moscow at 7pm.
Mr Putin, 59, voted alongside his wife Lyudmila at a polling station inside
the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was president from 2000 until 2008, when
he had to give up the post because of a constitutional limit on a
consecutive third term. He was replaced by his ally Dmitry Medvedev, who
said he had agreed with Mr Putin not to run for a second time.
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