Vladimir Putin elected president of Russia for third term amid fraud charges

Czar-in-the-making Vladimir Putin will keep his stranglehold on the Kremlin for another six years. The 59-year-old autocrat was elected president of Russia on Sunday in an election that observers charge was riddled with fraud, intimidation and ballot-box stuffing. Putin coasted to victory with a margin of about 64% — but a torrent of alleged election violations, as many as 5,000, swiftly raised doubts about the legitimacy of his mandate. Amid mounting outrage, the mother of all opposition rallies was planned for Monday. The iron man — who likes to pose bare-chested and next to Siberian tigers he’s shot — showed his softer side as tears streamed down his face in an emotional victory rally. “Glory to Russia!” he declared. He later blamed the tears on the cold wind. With an increasingly heavy hand, Putin has already run the country for 12 years, first as president and now as prime minister. His latest triumph marks a return gig as president. Branding his foes naysayers and sore losers, Putin sounded a jingoistic theme in his victory speech, thanking his supporters for foiling unnamed “outsiders” and “usurpers” in their unspecified plots to topple the Russian state. “I have promised that we would win — and we have won!” he declared to a flag-waving crowd. “We have won in an open and honest struggle.” Stretching credulity even further, his campaign manager Stanislav Govorukhin boasted that the world had witnessed one of the “cleanest elections in the entire history of Russia.” Mikhail Gorbachev, the last head of state of the Soviet Union, who has become increasingly critical of Putinism, sharply differed. “These are not going to be honest elections,” he said after casting his vote. “But we must not relent.” Charging the Kremlin had blatantly rigged the results, angry opposition leaders immediately geared up for a massive rally in downtown Moscow. Independent election watchdogs — permitted by the Putinites after widespread fraud in parliamentary elections three months ago — cited a uniquely Russian type of voter fraud, known as “carousel voting.” The practice involves busloads of voters driven to multiple polling places in caravans to cast their ballots multiple times, according to Golos, Russia’s leading elections monitor. In another abuse, independent observers monitoring a web camera at a remote polling station in the Caucasus Mountains spotted a large group of people stuffing fistfuls of ballots into ballot boxes. Acting only after the images went viral on the Internet, the Russian Central Election Commission decreed those results would be tossed out.