Putin's puppets How stagemanaged polls string along the voters

Two election cycles ago, in 2012, Sergei Mironov was loudly playing the role of opposition to Russia’s ruling party, wearing the white ribbon of the protest movement in the State Duma and claiming his run against Vladimir Putin was “serious ”.

- Andrew Roth

If made president, he said, he would even appoint the now deceased opposition leader Alexei Navalny as the head of Russia’s accounts chamber as an anticorruption measure.

Today, Mironov is a loud booster of the war in Ukraine. Since the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion two years ago, he has toured the occupied territories, posed with a sledgehammer from the Wagner paramilitary group and reportedly taken a two-yearold missing child from Ukraine for adoption and changed her name . ( He has disputed the report. )

Puppet candidates and pocket opposition parties have long played a role in Russia’s elections, part of a fake democracy that will put on its greatest show this week as the country goes to the polls to elect Putin for another six-year term.

But Mironov’s transformation into a grotesque war hawk has surprised even some of his former friends and associates .

“I considered him a decent person before the war,” said Alexey Lushnikov, a publicist and TV host, who met Mironov for the last time in 2021. “But this monstrous degradation that has taken place – it’s just an insane horror. I have no words to understand Mironov . ”

Those who know Mironov describe him as a political survivor who has sought to “catch” political trends to his own benefi t.

“He’s always been a bit of a player in life,” said Yaroslav, his son from his fi rst marriage (Mironov remarried for a fourth time in 2022). “He’s a person who doesn’t think any rules exist and whatever advantage he manages to obtain for himself is correct.”