Putin has been re-elected for the fifth time as the President of Russia

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin has secured a fifth term in office through a dubious national plebiscite.

But Russia's three-day presidential vote was never about democratic procedure. For the Kremlin, a resounding first-round win will give the incumbent a fresh stamp of legitimacy and sends a clear message: Putin's war on Ukraine has the full backing of his people.

In an address to the Russian people on the eve of the election, Putin urged voters to cast ballots as a show of national unity.

"I am convinced that you understand what a difficult period our country is going through now, what difficult challenges we face in almost all spheres," he said. "And in order to continue to respond to them with dignity and successfully overcome difficulties, we continue to need to be united and self-confident."

The people of Russia, Putin added, "are one big family!"

That's a message Putin repeated after polls closed. In an appearance with a crowd of youthful campaign activists wearing shirts with a logo reading "Putin Russia Victory," the Russian president said Russians "are all one team, all [the] Russian citizens that came to the polls to vote."

But Putin also alluded vaguely to "a lot of tasks ahead of us" following his re-election.

In the run-up to the vote, Putin had been coy about what those tasks might be exactly if he secured a fifth presidential term.

In a generally anodyne interview with government propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov, Putin evaded speculation about whether, for instance, a government shake-up might be expected after the election.

Asked if the government of Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin might survive post-election, Putin merely said, "We need to talk about this after the elections, after the votes are counted. It seems to me that now this is simply incorrect. But on the whole, the government is working ... quite satisfactorily."

away. Didn't this happen in the United States? It did, and not once."

That might suggest Putin thinks he is on safe ground. But whataboutism is not necessarily a sign of confidence.

Predicting Putin's post-election course of action is a tricky business. The Russian leader has for the short term sanction-proofed his economy; his ammunition factories are outproducing the US and its European allies and the political landscape has been cleared of all competition.

But war is always unpredictable. And whatever Putin's efforts to spin things in his favor, Russia's longer-term problems - demographic decline, the cost of war and sanctions, and the inherent brittleness of one-man rule - are not likely to disappear before Putin stands for a sixth term in office.