Russian President Vladimir Putin. Fox News/AFP.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced that he is again running for the office of President in 2024. Fox News. Putin made the announcement at an awards ceremony for veterans, where soldiers and others begged him to run. Putin is 71 and has been in power in Russia, as either President or Prime Minster, since 1999. Putin is widely expected to win, in his last election he got 76% of the vote in 2018 and has an approval rate of 82%. Voting will take over three days in March and will be opened in recently annexed regions in what was Ukraine. It is unclear who will face him, though several people have mentioned possibly running.
My Comment:
This is not at all surprising. Given how Putin and Russia feel about the Ukraine war, it would be crazy if Putin had decided to step down and let someone else run it during the end-game. Putin feels that the Ukraine war is an existential threat to Russia and the Russian people and must be won if there is a future for either of them, so I don't think he trusts anyone else to manage the conflict.
It's also not surprising that under these circumstances the Russian people feel the same way and will support another term for Putin. They know that it's probably a bad idea to change presidents in the middle of a major war and I doubt that they want to get rid of them, no matter how much the CIA wishes it was true.
Putin has been an effective leader for Russia. Not only did he fix the economy in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, he has stood up for Russian interests and made Russia one of the most powerful countries in the world. He essentially won the economic and political wars over Ukraine already, now he is just waiting for the battlefield victory as well.
Will the elections be fair? Probably not. But not significantly worse than the United States. We can't complain about Putin jailing political opponents and the possibility of voter fraud when Biden's doing the same thing to Trump and we can't even mention voter fraud in polite company anymore despite the fact that it happens in every election now.
Still, it's possible that Putin won't get elected. He is, after all, 71, which isn't as old as Joe Biden or Donald Trump, but old regardless. He also has a lot of enemies, both foreign and domestic and is in a high stress job. I don't doubt that Putin would win an election, but it's possible he won't make it to election day.
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