Russian election: Vladimir Putin declares he will stand in 2024 vote - and on why he could remain in power until 2036

Vladimir Putin has declared his candidacy to again become Russia’s president

Vladimir Putin has moved to prolong his repressive and unyielding grip on Russia for another six years, announcing his candidacy in the 2024 presidential election that he is all but certain to win.

The decision was announced by state media after members of the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament, earlier this week voted unanimously to approve a decree setting the date for March 17.

“With this decision, we are effectively kickstarting the presidential campaign,” said Valentina Matviyenko, head of the chamber.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is likely to stand in the presidential election next year. Picture: AFP via Getty Images

Mr Putin subsequently announced his decision to run after a Kremlin award ceremony, when war veterans and others pleaded with him to seek re-election.

“I won’t hide it from you – I had various thoughts about it over time, but now, you’re right, it’s necessary to make a decision,” Mr Putin said in a video released by the Kremlin after the event. “I will run for president of the Russian Federation.”

Mr Putin still commands wide support after nearly a quarter-century in power, despite starting an immensely costly war in Ukraine that has taken thousands of his countrymen’s lives, provoked repeated attacks inside Russia – including one on the Kremlin itself – and corroded its aura of invincibility. That support has him poised to win for a fifth time.

Constitutional reforms voted in last year allow him to take another two terms, potentially setting him up to govern until 2036. However, his age – 71 - raises questions over whether he is likely to continue beyond the coming six-year term.

Tatiana Stanovaya, from the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre, noted the announcement was made in a low-key way instead of a live televised speech, probably reflecting the Kremlin’s spin effort to emphasise Mr Putin’s modesty and his perceived focus on doing his job as opposed to loud campaigning.

“It’s not about prosperity, it’s about survival,” Ms Stanovaya observed. “The stakes have been raised to the maximum.”

Luke March, deputy director of the Princess Dashkova Russian Centre at the University of Edinburgh, said he believed it was unlikely that any credible candidates would stand against Mr Putin.

Many prominent critics who could challenge Mr Putin on the ballot are either in jail or living abroad, and most independent media has already been banned. Parties expected to field candidates have no high profile, popular members likely to win over voters, even if a fair election was to go ahead.

"There'll be no one unexpected, no one who's not been vetted,” said Prof March, pointing to the requirement to gather tens of thousands of signatures across multiple regions if standing for a party outside of the five main parties in the Duma.

According to Russian election laws, candidates put forward by a party that is not represented in the State Duma or in at least a third of regional legislatures have to submit at least 100,000 signatures from 40 or more regions. Those running independently of any party need at least 300,000 signatures from 40 regions or more.

Prof March said: “Any such candidate will not get through, they will not get the signatures, or even if it looked like they were getting the momentum on the signatures, the system is such that they could just say ‘half of these signatures are fraudulent, sorry’.

"It is entirely stage managed, so that the only unpredictability you could get is if one of the approved candidates somehow says things that aren't on the script.”

Two people willing to face this battle have announced plans to run – former legislator Boris Nadezhdin, who holds a seat on a municipal council in the Moscow region, and Yekaterina Duntsova, a journalist and lawyer from the Tver region north of Moscow, who was once a member of a local legislature.

Mr Putin, too, is required to follow these rules. In 2018, when he ran as an independent candidate, his campaign gathered the requisite signatures.

Prof March said while Mr Putin’s team would want it to look like it is a fair election, there is no doubt that he will win. Independent polls show his popularity has not been dented by either last summer’s attempted uprising by now-dead Wagner Group leader Yvgeny Prigozhin, or slow progress in the war in Ukraine have dented his popularity.

"The rumour is that he's expected to get at least 80 per cent,” Prof March said. “So that will happen. He's got to look like he's absolutely in control of things and he has no challenge, particularly in wartime. If they saying they're going to get 80 per cent, they will get 80 per cent. That's irrespective of what the electorate actually feels about it.

“Increasingly there’s a very loose connection between how people might vote in free and fair election and how they'll actually vote.”

Unlike in Belarus, a close ally of Mr Putin’s, where it was widely believed the electorate voted in favour of opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, but the victory was declared by long-standing leader Alexander Lukahsenko, sending Ms Tsikhanouskaya into exile – Prof March says the pressure on citizens to support Mr Putin’s leadership will mean he could garner enough votes.

"They can do it without actually rigging things or, or printing out lots of extra ballots,” he said. “They can they can do it by just making sure that he's not standing against anyone really viable. A lot of the actual pressure and manipulation doesn't happen on the day itself.

"The whole climate that's been created in the last couple of years is [they] use you either to support the authorities, either openly or passively. You do what you're told, and there are penalties for expressing dissenting views. While that's not explicitly about not voting for Putin, it's the kind of direction that people get to understand, that they are expected to rally around the powers that be.”

For the first time, residents of the parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions of Ukraine annexed by Russia will be eligible to take part in the election.

The central election commission plans online voting in addition to traditional paper ballots in about 30 Russian regions and is considering stretching the voting across three days – a practice that was adopted during the pandemic and widely criticised by independent election monitors.

Those measures, on top of restrictions on monitoring adopted in recent years, will severely limit the possibility of independent observers, according to Stanislav Andreychuk, co-chair of Golos, an independent election monitoring group.

Mr Andreychuk said only registered candidates or state-backed advisory bodies, the Civic Chambers, can assign observers to polling stations, decreasing the likelihood of truly independent watchdogs. There is very little transparency with online voting and, if the balloting lasts for three days, it will be difficult to cover nearly 100,000 polling stations in the country.

“Regular monitoring [at the polls] poses the biggest problem at this point,” Mr Andreychuk said. “But we will be working in any case.”