Ryssland varnar baltstater inför presidentvalet

The presidential election in Russia will be held on 15–17 March 2024. This will be the eighth presidential election in the country. If no candidate receives more than half the vote, a second round will take place exactly three weeks later, on 7 April 2024. The winner is scheduled to be inaugurated on 7 May 2024. 15 individuals (six self-nominated candidates (independents) and nine party representatives) have submitted documents to the Central Election Commission in order to register as candidates.In November 2023, former member of the State Duma Boris Nadezhdin became the first person backed by a registered political party to announce his candidacy, running on an anti-war platform. He was followed by incumbent and independent candidate Vladimir Putin in December 2023, who is eligible to seek re-election as a result of 2020 constitutional amendments. Later the same month, Leonid Slutsky of the LDPR, Nikolay Kharitonov of the Communist Party, Vladislav Davankov of New People and others announced their candidacies. As was the case in the 2018 presidential election, the most prominent member of the Russian opposition, Alexei Navalny, is barred from running due to a prior criminal conviction, and it was expected that he would remain imprisoned during the election. The criminal cases against Navalny have been widely regarded as politically motivated. As a result, many observers, particularly in Western countries, do not expect the election to be either free or fair. Instead, they expect the election process to be dominated by Putin, who has been accused of increasing political repressions ever since launching his full-scale war with Ukraine in 2022.