Russia: Protesters urge boycott of presidential vote even as opposition leader is arrested | The Washington Post

From central Moscow to the Arctic, thousands of Russian protesters on Sunday called for a boycott of the upcoming presidential election even as the authorities detained organizers and raided the office of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Police detained Navalny, who branded the boycott a “voters’ strike” against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government, shortly after the protests began. But more than 1,000 people took to one of Moscow’s central thoroughfares nevertheless. Thousands more turned out on squares and streets in St. Petersburg, in Siberia and in places as remote as Murmansk, a port city in the far north where the temperature Sunday afternoon was 8 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. 

Russia: Boycott or vote? Putin foes split as Russian election nears. | The Washington Post

If you oppose Vladimir Putin, is it even worth voting? This basic question over how much remains of Russian democracy is driving an emotional and divisive debate in the ranks of this country’s political opposition. Barred from the ballot in the March 18 presidential election, Russia’s most prominent Putin critic, Alexei Navalny, is staging rallies across the country this Sunday to call for a boycott of the vote. Other opposition politicians are furious over Navalny’s effort, arguing that convincing anti-Putin voters to stay home would be a gift to a Kremlin looking to the election as affirmation of its power. 

Russia: Russia’s Election: New Faces, but No Real News | The National Interest

Another round of Putin’s reelection (as Russians have come to call presidential elections) is scheduled for March 18, 2018. While little may be surprising about who will actually win, the Kremlin is trying its very best to inject some interest and entertainment value into the election. Russia’s authorities have learned from the experience of the 2011–12 election, when public dissatisfaction with lack of change led to a series of countrywide mass rallies. For a start, the authorities have introduced some liberalization to Russia’s formal electoral rules. Among other things, they permitted an increase in the official number of candidates. Legislative amendments allowed more parties to form; in the 2017 parliamentary election, fourteen parties were formally allowed to compete, as opposed to only seven parties in the prior election in 2011. Since parties can nominate their own presidential candidates, the 2018 presidential field is also expected to widen in comparison with the previous presidential election, in which only five candidates were officially registered to participate.

Russia: Court Closes Foundation of Aleksei Navalny, a Kremlin Critic | The New York Times

A Moscow court on Monday ordered the closing of a foundation supporting the activities of Aleksei A. Navalny, the country’s leading opposition politician, moving quickly in a case filed only this month by the Justice Ministry. The court order came before a series of rallies in more than 90 Russian cities and towns, scheduled for Sunday and organized by Mr. Navalny and his supporters. The foundation, the Fifth Season of the Year, has been used by Mr. Navalny to collect donations that finance campaign materials, salaries and offices in 84 regions across Russia, among other weapons in his drive against corruption and the workings of the Kremlin under President Vladimir V. Putin. More than 145,000 Russians have donated $4.9 million to the foundation over the past 13 months, Mr. Navalny says.

Russia: Pollster pulls pre-election research over closure fears | Reuters

Russia’s only major independent pollster, the Levada Center, said on Tuesday it had stopped publishing polls about the forthcoming presidential election because it feared the authorities might shut it down for perceived meddling. The move, which the Kremlin later endorsed as a necessary step to comply with the law, will reduce open source information about public sentiment ahead of the March 18 election which polls suggest incumbent Vladimir Putin, who is backed by state TV and the ruling party, will comfortably win. Levada is regarded as one of Russia’s three main pollsters and the only one not to be close to the authorities. But it was officially designated ‘a foreign agent’ in 2016 because of its funding, a move it and others said was designed to hobble it.

Russia: Court rejects opposition leader Navalny’s election complaint | Politico

The Russian Constitutional Court on Friday refused to review a complaint by opposition leader Alexei Navalny over his ban from running in this year’s presidential election, Russian news agency RIA reported. The complaint “does not meet the requirements of the federal constitutional law,” said Valery Zorkin, the chairman of the court, according to RIA. Zorkin said disqualifying people from becoming elected public officials due to past convictions upholds the “legitimacy” of elected office.

Russia: Russia’s only independent pollster, the Levada Center, has been blocked ahead of the election | Quartz

The Levada Center has long served as a crucial member of Russian civil society. The pollster has published the country’s only independent surveys, since it split from state-run VTsIOM in 2003, providing unique insights into Russians’ views about politics, economics, culture, and much else besides. Now, it has become another casualty of the country’s 2012 “foreign agents” law, which the Kremlin uses to crack down on organizations that get funding from outside Russia. Having been designated a “foreign agent” in 2016, Levada announced this week that it won’t publish political polls in the run-up to the presidential election on March 18 for fear that authorities might shut it down for falling foul of the law. That means that as the country enters an election cycle where president Vladimir Putin’s victory is certain, we won’t have any trustworthy data to give us a sense of how voters feel about the situation.

Russia: Behind the Scenes of Russia’s Imitated Democracy | Der Spiegel

Running a democracy isn’t easy. But imagine how challenging it must be to imitate one! Sets must be constantly rearranged and political roles must be assigned. The lighting has to be perfect and everybody needs to know their lines. Most importantly, though, the script must be well thought out far into the future, because the performance has no end. The way in which Russia elects its president is an example of this form of simulated democracy. Just recently, the Central Election Commission excluded Alexei Navalny, the only opposition politician who had run a serious campaign, from running in this year’s election. The candidate, the commission noted, has a criminal record, which disqualifies him from challenging the incumbent, Vladimir Putin.

Russia: High court reaffirms Navalny ban from presidential race | Deutsche Welle

Russia’s Supreme Court rejected an appeal on Saturday from opposition leader Alexei Navalny to run for president. One week after a lower court upheld a ruling by the Central Election Commission, which rejected his application to stand, the country’s high court backed the decision, citing a criminal conviction against the opposition leader. Navalny insists the embezzlement conviction against him is nothing more than a politically-motivated frame-up to keep him from running. Russia’s constitution prohibits anyone with a criminal conviction from seeking high office. President Vladimir Putin is widely expected to win the March election but, without Navalny, he faces only token opposition. Putin has been in office — as either president or prime minister — for nearly 20 years. Should he win re-election, Putin will become Russia’s longest-serving leader since dictator Josef Stalin.

Russia: Opposition leader appeals ban on election run against Putin | ABC

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has submitted another appeal to the nation’s courts after he was banned from running against President Vladimir Putin, according to Russian media reports. On Wednesday, Navalny submitted an appeal to appellate body of the Russian Supreme Court after his previous challenge to the ruling by the country’s electoral commission, which banned him from running in this year’s presidential election, was denied. Russia’s Central Elections Commission blocked Navalny from running last month by preventing a group of his supporters from nominating him, on the grounds that Navalny had been convicted of fraud.

Russia: Putin’s Rival Can’t Run for President, But He’s Still a Threat | Bloomberg

Now that he’s been officially barred from challenging Russian President Vladimir Putin in presidential elections next March, opposition leader Alexey Navalny is counting on becoming an even bigger nuisance for the Kremlin. The 41-year-old Navalny, who is banned from appearing on state television and whose name Putin never even mentions in public, is urging his supporters to protest nationwide on Jan. 28 as part of a campaign to boycott the vote. “Going to vote now just means fixing Putin’s problems by helping him disguise his reappointment as something that looks like an election,” Navalny wrote on his blog after Russia’s Central Election Commission refused to register him as a candidate due to a fraud conviction that Navalny denounces as politically motivated. In a video, he accused Putin of being “afraid of running against me.”

Russia: Supreme court rules Kremlin critic cannot run for president | The Guardian

Russia’s supreme court has upheld a ban on the government critic Alexei Navalny from running for president, a decision he has vowed to respond to with nationwide protests. “We don’t recognise elections without competition,” Navalny wrote on Twitter after the ruling on Saturday. He did not attend the hearing, which his lawyers say they will appeal against at the European court of human rights. The ruling was widely expected and came after Russia’s central election committee said on 25 December that Navalny, 41, was not allowed to stand for public office until at least 2028 because of a previous fraud conviction.

Russia: Court upholds ban on Navalny running against Putin in 2018 | Reuters

Russia’s Supreme Court on Saturday dismissed an appeal by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny against a decision by the country’s central election commission to bar him from taking part in next year’s presidential election. The commission this week barred Navalny from taking part in the March 18 vote because of a suspended prison sentence he says was trumped up. Navalny, who did not attend the Supreme Court hearing, wrote on Twitter that he and his supporters “will not recognize elections without competition” and renewed calls for a boycott of the vote.

Russia: Alexey Navalny and the Empty Spectacle of the Russian Election | The New Yorker

It’s hard to write about the Russian Presidential election, not because it is particularly difficult to understand but because the normal language of such things can’t describe it. There are candidates, but their names can appear on the ballot only if the Kremlin allows it. There is a campaign, but candidates are allowed to appear on television only if the Kremlin O.K.s it. There are, usually, debates, but Vladimir Putin, who has been in power in Russia for eighteen years and is running for another six-year term, doesn’t deign to take part in them. There are opinion polls, but their results are adjusted to fit the probable result of the vote. And then there is the vote, but its outcome is preordained. In other words, the event scheduled for March 18, 2018, is not an election, but it is called one.

Russia: Kremlin rejects concerns over banning of Alexei Navalny from elections | The Guardian

Russia has rejected concerns that a decision to bar the government critic Alexei Navalny from running against Vladimir Putin in next March’s presidential election could undermine the vote’s legitimacy, as the Kremlin hinted at reprisals in response to opposition calls for a boycott of the polls. Russia’s election committee ruled on Monday that Navalny should be ineligible to stand for public office until at least 2028 because of a previous conviction for fraud. Navalny, who has spent the past year carrying out a nationwide grassroots election campaign, said the charges that led to his conviction were trumped up to prevent him from challenging Putin. He said he would ask his 200,000 campaign volunteers to divert their efforts into convincing Russians to boycott the election and he also called for nationwide protests. “Vladimir Putin is extremely shaken up. He’s afraid of competing with me,” Navalny said in an online video address. “What they are offering us can’t be called elections. Only Putin and the candidates he has personally selected, those who don’t represent even the smallest threat to him, are taking part. To go to the polling station now is to vote for lies and corruption.”

Russia: Barred From Running, Barred From Boycotting: A Russian Candidate’s Quandary | The New York Times

Aleksei A. Navalny, a Russian anticorruption activist, would have no real chance of defeating President Vladimir V. Putin in an election. The authorities have cast him as an utterly irrelevant showboat. But on Monday the Kremlin barred him from running for president in March. Then on Tuesday, threatening legal action, it warned him against organizing a boycott of the election. In one surreal turn after another, the Russian authorities have dismissed Mr. Navalny, a charismatic and canny street politician, as a nonentity — and then have done everything in their power to make sure that is the case. The boycott warning came from Mr. Putin’s spokesman, and was issued the same day the president, who has been in power for almost 18 years, was formally nominated to seek a fourth term.

Russia: Central Election Commission allocates $300M for next presidential elections | Moscow Times

Russia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) has been allocated 17.7 billion rubles ($302mn) to cover the costs of running the presidential election scheduled for March 2018, the commission said in a statement this week. There is little doubt that President Vladimir Putin will be elected for his fourth non-consecutive 6-year presidential term in 2018 and the Kremlin is expected to work hard to ensure a clean and legitimate victory while setting a solid voting system in place.

Russia: Election date set for March 18 | AFP

Russia’s presidential election will take place on March 18, the upper house of parliament said Friday, in polls that are all but certain to return Vladimir Putin to the Kremlin for a new six-year term. The election campaign will kick off on Monday, agencies quoted senators as saying. “According to our calculations there are already at least 23 people who have expressed a desire to stand,” said Ella Pamfilova, head of the Central Election Committee, according to Interfax. Independent candidates are officially required to collect 300,000 signatures of support before they are allowed on the ballot paper.

Russia: Putin’s Re-election Is Assured. Let the Succession Fight Begin. | The New York Times

Ask Russian analysts to describe the coming presidential election campaign, and their answers contain a uniform theme: a circus, a carnival, a sideshow. What they do not call it is a real election. With the victory of President Vladimir V. Putin assured, the real contest, analysts said, is the bare-knuckled, no-holds-barred fight to determine who or what comes after him by the end of his next six years in office, in 2024. What might be called the Court of Putin — the top 40 to 50 people in the Kremlin and their oligarch allies — will spend the coming presidential term brawling over that future. When Mr. Putin confirmed last week that he would run again, he might as well have been firing the starting gun for the race toward his succession. He is barred by the Constitution from seeking a third-consecutive term, his fifth total, in 2024.

Russia: Vladimir Putin makes it official – he’s running for re-election in 2018 | The Guardian

Vladimir Putin has made the long-expected announcement that he will seek a new six-year presidential term at elections in March. If he wins, which he almost certainly will, Putin will have spent 24 years as Russian leader by the end of his term in 2024, including four years when he was prime minister but still called the shots. “I will put forward my candidacy for the post of president of the Russian Federation,” said Putin during a meeting with factory workers in the city of Nizhny Novgorod on Wednesday afternoon. “Russia will continue moving forwards, and nobody will ever be able to stop this forward movement,” he said, in what may be an early sign that the campaign would invoke nationalist rhetoric of a Russia facing off against a hostile west.

Russia: Yes, the Kremlin is worried — about Russia’s own presidential elections | The Washington Post

|It’s a foregone conclusion that Vladimir Putin will win Russia’s March 2018 presidential elections, so why is the Kremlin fretting about turnout? And how is Russia’s big business supposed to help get people to vote? Here’s what’s going on. Russia’s Central Election Commission is expected to formally kick off the campaign season sometime in mid-December, and Putin will likely declare his candidacy shortly afterwards. But Russia under Vladimir Putin is not a democracy. The Constitutional Court has deemed the country’s best-known opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, ineligible to register for the upcoming March 2018 election, citing two controversial financial-crimes convictions. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that both decisions were arbitrary and unreasonable.

Russia: Putin says Olympic disqualifications are sign of U.S. meddling in Russia’s elections  | The Washington Post

Russian President Vladi­mir Putin on Thursday accused the United States of trying to interfere with Russia’s presidential campaign in retaliation for what the Kremlin dismisses as unfounded U.S. allegations that Moscow interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential vote. On the eve of a possible meeting with President Trump at an economic forum in Vietnam, Putin suggested that the United States is pressing for the disqualification of Russian athletes at the 2018 Winter Olympics as a way of creating discontent with his tenure as president. The International Olympic Committee recently banned six Russian cross-country skiers, including two 2014 Olympic medalists, from future competition in an ongoing doping investigation based on a damning 2016 report. With fewer than 100 days before the beginning of the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, the IOC has still not made a decision about whether to let the country that hosted the 2014 Games participate.

Russia: Russia Hackers Pursued Putin Foes, Not Just US Democrats | Associated Press

It wasn’t just Hillary Clinton’s emails they went after. The hackers who disrupted the U.S. presidential election last year had ambitions that stretched across the globe, targeting the emails of Ukrainian officers, Russian opposition figures, U.S. defense contractors and thousands of others of interest to the Kremlin, according to a previously unpublished digital hit list obtained by The Associated Press. The list provides the most detailed forensic evidence yet of the close alignment between the hackers and the Russian government, exposing an operation that went back years and tried to break into the inboxes of 4,700 Gmail users — from the pope’s representative in Kiev to the punk band Pussy Riot in Moscow. The targets were spread among 116 countries. “It’s a wish list of who you’d want to target to further Russian interests,” said Keir Giles, director of the Conflict Studies Research Center in Cambridge, England, and one of five outside experts who reviewed the AP’s findings. He said the data was “a master list of individuals whom Russia would like to spy on, embarrass, discredit or silence.”

Russia: Putin’s Acolytes Are Determined to Crush the Opposition, One Activist at a Time | Newsweek

Ivan Skripnichenko, a 35-year-old Russian opposition activist, was standing guard at a makeshift memorial to a slain Kremlin foe when a man dressed in army surplus clothing walked up to him. “Don’t you love Putin?” he asked, before knocking Skripnichenko down with a punch to the face. Eight days later, Skripnichenko was dead. “It was a powerful and professional blow,” Marina Lebedeva, an anti-government activist who says she witnessed the August 15 attack in central Moscow, tells Newsweek. The assailant also kicked Skripnichenko as he lay on the ground next to the flower-strewn “people’s memorial” for Boris Nemtsov, the opposition leader who was shot dead at the exact same spot near Red Square by Chechen gunmen in 2015. Authorities have refused to give permission for the memorial, and so opposition activists have been guarding it around-the-clock since Nemtsov’s murder.

Russia: Opposition leader’s fraud conviction arbitrary, Europe’s top rights court says | Reuters

Europe’s top human rights court ruled on Tuesday that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s conviction for fraud in 2014 had been “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable” and ordered Russia to pay him compensation. “We have won. Thanks everyone for support,” tweeted Navalny, a campaigner against corruption among Russia’s elite who hopes to run against Vladimir Putin in a March election. Putin is widely expected to seek and win a fourth term as president. Russian authorities have three months to decide whether to appeal against the ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the TASS news agency cited Russia’s deputy justice minister and ECHR representative Mikhail Galperin as saying.

Russia: A Bernie Sanders campaign veteran advises a surging opposition movement in Russia | The Washington Post

Vitali Shkliarov, a 41-year-old political operative born in Belarus, speaks the gospel of Bernie Sanders in the style of a Silicon Valley executive. Technology, he says, is a key to access, and his dream is a “political Uber” designed to pick up potential candidates and get them around the barriers keeping them from office. The idea got a test drive in Moscow’s recent municipal elections, but the veteran of the Sanders and Barack Obama campaigns sees it as part of a worldwide movement. “Obama made politics in America — but also worldwide — cool and sexy,” Shkliarov said in energetic, accented English during a recent interview at a Moscow cocktail bar. “Next, and I was part of it, was Sanders making politics like a Woodstock festival. It was about education, not partisanship.” The next step, he said, is to ensure that anyone can become a candidate. “This is the new era of politics, not just in Russia, but in America, too,” he said.

Russia: “No rules”: Russian activist’s death a symbol of pre-election violence | Reuters

Russian opposition activist Ivan Skripnichenko died after being attacked by a man angry he opposed Vladimir Putin. Over a month later, nobody has been arrested, his family can’t see his autopsy, and authorities say he probably died of heart disease. The assault on the 36-year-old father-of-two is one of a growing number of vicious attacks on opposition figures in the run-up to a presidential election in March which Putin, the incumbent, is widely expected to contest. Most activists do not believe that Putin or the Kremlin have a hand in the attacks, which have included caustic liquid being thrown in a victim’s eyes, a car being set alight, and, in one case, an activist being bashed over the head with an iron bar. But critics say the way the authorities have handled the cases – it’s rare for anyone to be arrested and a nationalist group which says its carries out such attacks openly boasts about its activities – shows that they are at best turning a blind eye, and at worst tacitly condoning the violence.

Russia: How Russians use technology to influence their own elections | TNW

A political sea change is emerging within the Russian Federation, and it’s all thanks to a web app. MunDep (that’s short for “municipal deputy”) is the online interface that gamifies the process of turning someone from Russian citizen into Russian political candidate. The country’s notorious bureaucracy usually keeps citizens away from participating in politics meaningfully, but MunDep presents itself as a convenient central hub for meeting a prospective candidate’s every conceivable need. It guides them through the process of filling out paperwork, collecting signatures, and printing political leaflets for distribution. When candidates face trouble of any sort, they can even chat with the human staff via voice or text. Thoroughly cutting through Russia’s red tape, this platform turns the country’s political registration process into a 15-step “quest” for office. MunDep is the brainchild of Maxim Katz, a former municipal representative currently focused on political technology. He operates it alongside Dmitry Gudkov, former Russian parliament member and current Moscow mayoral candidate, and Vitali Shkliarov, a former operative for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Russia: In Moscow, Putin’s opponents chalk up a symbolic victory | Politico.eu

Russia’s liberal opposition is on a high after achieving a series of unprecedented victories in the Kremlin’s backyard at local council elections — including in the wealthy Moscow district where Vladimir Putin cast his own ballot. The United Democrats coalition — spearheaded by Dmitry Gudkov, a former opposition lawmaker, and Yabloko, Russia’s oldest anti-Putin party — claimed 14 districts in the September 10 elections, in some cases winning with a landslide. Opposition candidates held just one district before Sunday’s vote. The majority of the districts won by the coalition lie in the very heart of Moscow. In the Tverskaya district, home to some of the city’s wealthiest residents, the opposition took 11 out of 12 council seats. The coalition also recorded a clean sweep of seats in the Gagarinsky district, the Red Square neighborhood where Putin is registered to vote.

Russia: At a Russian polling station, phantom voters cast ballots for the ‘Tsar’ | Reuters

At polling station no. 333 in the Russian city of Vladikavkaz, Reuters reporters only counted 256 voters casting their ballots in a regional election on Sunday. People were voting across Russia in what is seen as a dress rehearsal for next year’s presidential vote. Kremlin candidates for regional parliaments and governorships performed strongly nationwide. When the official results for polling station no. 333 were declared, the turnout was first given as 1,331 before being revised up to 1,867 on Tuesday. That is more than seven times higher than the number of voters counted by Reuters – with 73 percent of the votes going to United Russia, the party of President Vladimir Putin. Election officials at the polling station said their tally was correct and there were no discrepancies. Reuters reporters were there when the polls opened at 08:00 until after the official count had been completed. They saw one man, who said he was a United Russia election observer, approaching the ballot box multiple times and each time putting inside voting papers. “We must ensure 85 percent for United Russia. Otherwise, the Tsar will stop providing us with money,” the man, Sergei Lyutikov, told a reporter, in an apparent reference to Putin.