MOSCOW: Russians started voting on Friday in a three-day presidential election set to hand hardline leader Vladimir Putin another six-year term as fresh attacks bring the raging conflict in Ukraine further into Russian territory.
In power as president or prime minister since the final day of 1999, the former KGB agent is casting the election as a show of Russians’ loyalty and support for his military assault on Ukraine, now in its third year.
Polling stations in a country spread over 11 time zones opened at 8:00 a.m. on Friday (2000 GMT Thursday) on the Far Eastern Kamchatka peninsula and will close Sunday at 8:00 p.m. (1800 GMT) in Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, wedged between EU members Poland and Lithuania.
Victory will allow Putin to stay in power until 2030, longer than any Russian leader since Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century.
As voting started, both Moscow and Kyiv said civilians had been killed in the latest wave of overnight aerial strikes.
Putin had urged Russians to back him in the face of a “difficult period.”
“We have already shown that we can be together, defending the freedom, sovereignty and security of Russia ... Today it is critically important not to stray from this path,” he said in a pre-election message broadcast on state TV.
The Kremlin leader’s confidence is riding high with his troops recently having secured their first territorial gains in Ukraine in nearly a year.
At home, his most strident and charismatic critic of the last decade, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic prison colony last month. He had been serving 19 years on “extremism” charges widely seen as retribution for his campaigning against the Kremlin.
Western governments and Kyiv have condemned the vote as a “sham” and “farce.”
In Moscow, a few dozen residents queued in the morning sun to be among the first in the capital to cast their ballots.
“It’s important to vote, for Russia’s future,” said 70-year-old Lyudmila.
She said she backed Putin and was hoping for “above all, victory” in Ukraine.
Another Putin voter, Natan, 72, said he wanted the government to “increase employment, work to ensure that there is no war, stability in the country.”
With all of Putin’s major opponents dead, in prison or in exile, the outcome of the vote is not in any doubt.
Election authorities barred the few genuine opposition candidates who tried to run against Putin and a state-run pollster predicted earlier this week that Putin would secure more than 80 percent.
Voting was also being staged in occupied parts of eastern Ukraine that Russia claims to have annexed.
Armed soldiers in full combat gear accompanied election officials in the eastern Donetsk region as they set up mobile voting stations on small tables in the street and on the hoods of Soviet-era cars.
Kyiv has branded the vote as a “farce” and said staging the election in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, was “illegal.”
On Friday, EU chief Charles Michel sarcastically congratulated Putin on his “landslide victory.”
Those who oppose Putin still hope to spoil the procession. Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, is among those calling for voters to show up outside polling stations at midday on Sunday, the final day of voting, as a form of protest.
Moscow prosecutors warned it would punish those involved in “the organization of and participation in these mass events.”
Kyiv has launched some of its largest air attacks on Russia this week ahead of the election — some reaching hundreds of kilometers into Russian territory — and pro-Kyiv guerilla fighters have launched a series of attempted cross-border raids.
Russian-installed officials in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk said Friday that overnight shelling killed three children, while Kyiv said a Russian drone strike on the central Vinnytsia region killed two.
Voters in Belgorod were forced to leave a polling station to head to a bomb shelter as authorities issued an air alert and ordered people to take cover, the RIA Novosti state-run news agency reported. Russia’s defense ministry said Ukraine had fired seven rockets at the region.
Moscow on Friday also appeared to acknowledge that pro-Ukrainian militias had taken temporary control of territory inside Russia in three days of cross-border raids this week.
The defense ministry said it had “fully restored control” over one settlement in the Belgorod region, after Thursday hitting the fighters — made up of Russians who oppose the Kremlin — with artillery, air strikes and guided bombs.
Polls open in Russian vote to extend Vladimir Putin’s reign
https://arab.news/2wzrm
Polls open in Russian vote to extend Vladimir Putin’s reign
- Victory will allow Vladimir Putin to stay in power until 2030, longer than any Russian leader since Catherine the Great in the 18th century
Mystery of CIA’s lost nuclear device haunts Himalayan villagers 60 years on
- Plutonium-fueled spy system was meant to monitor China’s nuclear activity after 1964 atomic tests
- Porter who took part in Nanda Devi mission warned family of ‘danger buried in snow’
NEW DELHI: Porters who helped American intelligence officers carry a nuclear spy system up the precarious slopes of Nanda Devi, India’s second-highest peak, returned home with stories that sent shockwaves through nearby villages, leaving many in fear that still holds six decades later.
A CIA team, working with India’s Intelligence Bureau, planned to install the device in the remote part of the Himalayas to monitor China, but a blizzard forced them to abandon the system before reaching the summit.
When they returned, the device was gone.
The spy system contained a large quantity of highly radioactive plutonium-238 — roughly a third of the amount used in the atomic bomb dropped by the US on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in the closing stages of the Second World War.
“The workers and porters who went with the CIA team in 1965 would tell the story of the nuclear device, and the villagers have been living in fear ever since,” said Narendra Rana from the Lata village near Nanda Devi’s peak.
His father, Dhan Singh Rana, was one of the porters who carried the device during the CIA’s mission in 1965.
“He told me there was a danger buried in the snow,” Rana said. “The villagers fear that as long as the device is buried in the snow, they are safe, but if it bursts, it will contaminate the air and water, and no one will be safe after that.”
During the Sino-Indian tensions in the 1960s, India cooperated with the US in surveillance after China conducted its first nuclear tests in 1964. The Nanda Devi mission was part of this cooperation and was classified for years. It only came under public scrutiny in 1978, when the story was broken by Outsider magazine.
The article caused an uproar in India, with lawmakers demanding the location of the nuclear device be revealed and calling for political accountability. The same year, then Prime Minister Morarji Desai set up a committee to assess whether nuclear material in the area near Nanda Devi could pollute the Ganges River, which originates there.
The Ganges is one of the world’s most crucial freshwater sources, with about 655 million people in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh depending on it for their essential needs.
The committee, chaired by prominent scientists, submitted its report a few months later, dismissing any cause for concerns, and establishing that even in the worst-case scenario of the device’s rupture, the river’s water would not be contaminated.
But for the villagers, the fear that the shell containing radioactive plutonium could break apart never goes away, and peace may only come once it is found.
Many believe the device, trapped within the glacier’s shifting ice, may have moved downhill over time.
Rana’s father told him that the device felt hot when it was carried, and he believed it might have melted its way into the glacier, remaining buried deep inside.
An imposing mass of rock and ice, Nanda Devi at 7,816 m is the second-highest mountain in India after Kangchenjunga.
When a glacier near the mountain burst in 2021, claiming over 200 lives, scientists explained that the disaster was due to global warming, but in nearby villages the incident was initially blamed on a nuclear explosion.
“They feared the device had burst. Those rescuing people were afraid they might die from radiation,” Rana said. “If any noise is heard, if any smoke appears in the sky, we start fearing a leak from the nuclear device.”
The latent fear surfaces whenever natural disasters strike or media coverage puts the missing device back in the spotlight. Most recently, a New York Times article on the CIA mission’s 60th anniversary reignited the unease.
“The apprehensions are genuine. After 1965, Americans came twice to search for the device. The villagers accompanied them, but it could not be found, which remains a concern for the local community,” said Atul Soti, an environmentalist in Joshimath, Uttarakhand, about 50 km from Nanda Devi.
“People are worried. They have repeatedly sought answers from the government, but no clear response has been provided so far. Periodically, the villagers voice their concerns, and they need a definitive government statement on this issue.”
Despite repeated queries whenever media attention arises, Indian officials have not released detailed updates since the Desai-appointed committee submitted its findings.
“The government should issue a white paper to address people’s concerns. The white paper will make it clear about the status of the device, and whether leakage from the device could pollute the Ganges River,” Soti told Arab News.
“The government should be clear. If the government is not reacting, then it further reinforces the fear.”
