Thousands show their anger over Putin’s ‘unfair’ victory

Mr Putin, who secured almost 64 per cent of votes on Sunday, portrayed his return for a third term as president as a victory over opponents who he said were trying to usurp power by undermining the Russian state.

But opposition leaders said they drew 20,000 people into Moscow’s Pushkin Square – the scene of dissident protests during Soviet times – to call for new elections and an opening up of the political system crafted by Mr Putin during his 12-year rule

Anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny, one of the most influential opposition figures, told the crowd: “They robbed us. We are the power.”

He was then detained and taken away by the authorities.

Riot police in helmets then moved in to disperse several thousand protesters who stayed on the square, shoving away journalists and telling people to move on. Some were arrested at the rally, which police said was attended by 14,000 people.

Thousands of Putin supporters staged rallies closer to the red walls of the Kremlin, singing songs, waving Russian flags and chanting his name.

Up to 3,000 people turned out to rally against Mr Putin in St Petersburg, witnesses said.

Mr Putin says he won a six-year term as president in a fair and open contest, but vote monitors from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe echoed the opposition’s complaints that the election was slanted to favour him.

Tonino Picula, one of the vote monitors, yesterday said: “The point of elections is that the outcome should be uncertain. This was not the case in Russia.

“According to our assessment, these elections were unfair.”

The independent Russian elections watchdog Golos said that incomplete reports from its observers of individual polling station counts contradicted the official vote count, indicating that Mr Putin hovered perilously close to the 50 per cent mark needed for a first-round victory.

Although the monitors said there had been some improvements from the parliamentary poll on 4 December which observers said was marred by irregularities, they said Mr Putin still had an advantage over his rivals, because state resources were used to help him.

Although the observers’ findings have no legal bearing, they undermine Russian election officials’ statements that there were no serious violations.

Mr Putin’s opponents, fearing he will smother political and economic reforms, have refused to recognise the result, which could allow the former KGB spy to rule Russia for as long as Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who ruled for almost 20 years and was accused of presiding over “the years of stagnation”.

“I used to love Putin, like any woman who likes a charismatic man. But now I think he is getting senile. Nobody can stay in power forever,” Vasilisa Maslova, 35, who works in the fashion trade, said during the opposition rally. “Voting yesterday, I felt like I was choosing the least dirty toilet in a crowded train station.”

In a conciliatory move, Mr Putin invited his defeated rivals to talks, though Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov did not attend.

The Kremlin also took steps that appeared intended to try to take the sting out of the protests which began over the 4 December parliamentary poll, won by Mr Putin’s United Russia party.

Putin ally, president Dmitry Medvedev, who will stay in office until early May, told the prosecutor general to study the legality of 32 criminal cases, including the jailing of former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Mr Khodorkovsky – who headed what was Russia’s biggest oil company, Yukos, and was once the country’s richest man – was arrested in 2003 and jailed for tax evasion and fraud after showing political ambitions and falling out with Mr Putin.

But Mr Zyuganov claimed that Mr Medvedev’s initiatives “have only one goal: To at least somehow lower the scale of dismay and protest that continues to surge in society.”