Western leaders condemn Putin's sham re-election

'Putin removes his political opponents, controls the media, and then crowns himself the winner' says David Cameron

- TOM WATLING

Western leaders have lined up to condemn the sham election that has handed Vladimir Putin another six years in power – as an independent Russian vote monitoring group called it the most corrupt in the country’s history.

The Kremlin claimed that President Putin won more than 87 per cent of the vote, by far the biggest landslide in post-Soviet Russian history. That follows years of repression and a crackdown on dissent that has accelerated since Moscow invaded Ukraine two years ago and the whole election process being controlled. In claiming victory, Putin again sought to threaten the West against deploying troops to Ukraine, saying that a possible conflict between Russia and Nato would put the world “a step away” from a third world war.

The announcement last month that Putin’s fiercest critic, Alexei Navalny, was dead – with the opposition leader having spent his last few weeks in a brutal Arctic prison on charges that the international community have decried as trumped up – was the starkest example of the state of Putin’s Russia ahead of the election. World leaders laid the blame for Nanalny’s death at Putin’s door, and his widow Yulia called Putin “a killer, a gangster”.

Other Navalny allies later accused Putin of being a “bloodsucking bug who will soon burst” after the Russian leader said his rival’s name for the first time in public for the first time in years as he claimed victory

“Putin removes his political opponents, controls the media, and then crowns himself the winner,” said Britain’s foreign secretary, David Cameron. “This is not democracy.”