Russian citizens have conducted a string of explosive protests in defiance of a presidential election rigged in favour of Vladimir Putin as voting opened on Friday. 

Video purported to show a woman dousing a Moscow voting booth in flammable liquid before setting it on fire and recording the drama on her smartphone.

The fire was promptly extinguished and the woman detained, according to local media. But similar acts of vandalism continued around the country, with a voter setting a ballot box alight in Khanty Mansi region in Siberia, according to local reports.

In Saint Petersburg, a woman threw a Molotov cocktail at a school being used as a voting station, according to electoral authorities, while an explosive device was detonated at a polling station in Russian-occupied southern Ukraine.

Five people in at least four regions poured dye into ballot boxes, and another was detained for lighting fireworks inside the polling station.

As citzens turn out to vote between March 15 and 17, critics of incumbent president Vladimir Putin have turned out in brave defiance to undermine polling efforts.

Running effectively unchallenged, the 71-year-old Kremlin chief is almost certain to secure another six-year term with any legitimate political opponents in jail, in exile or in the ground after his fiercest of opponents, Alexei Navalny, died in a remote Arctic penal colony last month.

Russian police detained at least eight people Friday for acts of vandalism at polling stations on the first day of voting in presidential elections, officials said.

Authorities did not say if the protests were directed against longtime leader Vladimir Putin, and state-media reports said voting was ‘continuing as normal’.

In the Chelyabinsk region, police detained a man who tried to set firecrackers off at a polling station, the TASS news agency reported, citing the regional government.

And in a school being used for polling in Kogalym, ‘an unsuccessful attempt was made to set fire to a stationary ballot box using a Molotov cocktail,’ the region’s election commission said.

The suspect was in her 20s, electoral official Maxim Meiksin said on Telegram. ‘The unlawful actions were promptly stopped by police officers. No one was injured,’ he added.

And an explosive device was detonated at a polling station in Russian-occupied southern Ukraine but caused no deaths.

‘In Skadovsk, an improvised explosive device was planted in a rubbish bin in front of a polling station. It detonated. There are no casualties or injuries,’ Moscow’s electoral commission in the occupied Kherson region said.

Russia has enforced voting in occupied parts of Ukraine, drawing ire from Putin-opposed residents. 

Russian forces also said that Kyiv had shelled polling stations in the occupied city of Kakhovka.

In what did appear to be a politically motivated act, a ‘resident of Moscow set fire to a voting booth at a polling station in the south-eastern administrative district,’ Moscow with a Twinkle reported this afternoon.

‘She poured flammable liquid, set it on fire and began filming on her phone.

‘The fire was quickly extinguished. The woman was detained.’

In another clip, a woman was seen pouring green dye into a ballot box in Moscow.

The woman was reportedly detained and a case opened under ‘obstruction of the exercise of voting right or the work of election commissions’.

Seen on video, she placed her unfolded voting paper in the ballot box, then emptied disinfectant from a bottle, ruining the papers inside.

The dark green liquid is zelenka – a dye widely used as a disinfectant for wounds by hospitals in Russia and other ex-Soviet countries.

The woman – believed to be 20 – took a picture of her act, and was immediately detained.

She would be taken to Russia’s investigative committee department for ‘interrogation’, local media claimed.

Russian outlet Siren reported earlier today that polling booths appeared to be using ‘disappearing ink’ on ballot sheets, which is erased ‘when heated’.

‘The inscription disappears when heated, although the pen looks ordinary,’ a Russian reader from Kursk told the outlet.

‘They told everyone to be silent and only put down these pens from the boxes they brought.’

A reader from Rostov-on-Don also claimed ink evaporated when introduced to heat.

Video appeared to show crosses on a ballot sheet expressing preference disappearing when put near the flame from a disposable lighter.

State-run media said that voter turnout had already reached 23 per cent by late afternoon in Moscow on Friday.

Vladimir Putin is expected to win the March elections, having signed a law in 2021 allowing him to serve two more terms as Russian President.

He was first elected president in 2000, before being re-elected in 2004, 2012 and 2018.  

The three other candidates on the ballot are low-profile politicians from token opposition parties that toe the Kremlin’s line.

The election takes place against the backdrop of a ruthless crackdown that has crippled independent media and prominent rights groups, giving Putin full control of the political system as Moscow’s war in Ukraine enters its third year. 

Russian citizens were forced to cast their votes in presidential elections from their beds today as polling officials set out to garner a high turnout for incumbent president Vladimir Putin. 

Dystopian images emerged of an elderly, bed-ridden man looking over his shoulder as a stern-faced woman presumed to be his wife thrusts their voting cards into an empty ballot box held by an election official. 

Meanwhile, a pair of newlyweds were filmed rushing into a polling station – still sporting a veil, resplendent white dress and smart suit – having cut short their wedding celebrations so they could cast their votes as early as possible.

Speaking to journalists in Moscow, one voter, Lyudmila Petrova, encapsulated the attitude of many Russians ahead of the election.

‘I support Putin and, of course, I will vote for him… he raised Russia up from its knees. And Russia will defeat the West and Ukraine. You cannot defeat Russia – ever. 

‘Have you in the West gone completely mad? What is Ukraine to do with you?’

Voters are casting their ballots Friday through to Sunday at polling stations across the vast country’s 11 time zones, as well as in illegally annexed regions of Ukraine.

Russians also can vote online, the first time the option has been used in a presidential contest; more than 200,000 people in Moscow voted online soon after the polls opened, authorities said.

Observers have little to no expectation that the election will be free and fair. 

‘Putin has no competitors – he is at a completely different level,’ one senior Russian lawmaker told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

‘The West made a very serious mistake by helping to unify a large part of the Russian elite and the Russian population around Putin with its sanctions and its vilification of Russia.’

Beyond the fact that voters have been presented with no viable candidate other than Putin, the possibilities for independent monitoring are very limited.

Only registered candidates or state-backed advisory bodies can assign observers to polling stations, decreasing the likelihood of independent watchdogs. 

With balloting over three days in nearly 100,000 polling stations in the country, any true monitoring is difficult anyway.

‘The elections in Russia as a whole are a sham. The Kremlin controls who’s on the ballot. The Kremlin controls how they can campaign. To say nothing of being able to control every aspect of the voting and the vote-counting process,’ said Sam Greene, director for Democratic Resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington.

Ukraine and the West have also condemned Russia for holding the vote in Ukrainian regions that Moscow’s forces have seized and occupied.

Putin himself said Friday that a string of Ukrainian attacks carried out as presidential polls were opening in Russia represented a bid to ‘disrupt’ the voting process.

Russian border regions this week have been targeted by fatal Ukrainian bombardments and faced repeated incursions by pro-Kyiv militias comprised of anti-Kremlin Russians.

‘These strikes by the enemy do not and will not go unpunished,’ Putin said in televised comments at a meeting with his security council.

‘I am sure our people, the people of Russia, will respond to this with even greater unity,’ he said.

He claimed that Ukrainian assault groups had attempted to gain control of Russian territory at least three times in the Belgorod border region and also in the neighbouring territory of Kursk.

‘This is an attempt to interfere with the presidential election,’ Putin said.

He also claimed that Russian troops had ousted Ukrainian forces from both the Kursk and Belgorod regions and that Russian air defence systems had downed most projectiles fired by Kyiv’s forces.

Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of conflict in eastern Ukraine between Kyiv’s forces on one side and pro-Russian Ukrainians and Russian proxies on the other.

Tens of thousands of soldiers have been killed and many more wounded on both sides, thousands of Ukrainian civilians are dead and Ukraine’s economy and infrastructure have suffered damage worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

The West, which says Putin is a threat well beyond the former Soviet Union, has supplied Ukraine with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of aid, weapons and top-level intelligence. Western leaders accuse Putin of waging a brutal imperial-style war aimed at restoring Russia’s global clout.

Putin casts the war as part of an existential battle with a declining and decadent West which he says humiliated Russia after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 by encroaching on what Putin considers to be Moscow’s sphere of influence, including Ukraine.

That appeals to many Russians who are suspicious about the West’s politics and intentions, if not its consumer goods. Top Kremlin officials, some sporting sweatshirts bearing the words ‘Putin’s Team’, speak openly of war with NATO.

Putin’s approval rating is currently 86%, up from 71% shortly before the invasion of Ukraine, according to Levada Centre, a respected Russian pollster. 

Putin’s rating also jumped during the 2008 war with Georgia and the 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.

Now, after a disastrous first year and a grinding second, Russian forces have the advantage on Ukraine’s battlefields, where they are making slow but steady gains in the third year of all-out conflict.

But Ukraine has made Moscow look vulnerable behind the front line: Long-range drone attacks have struck deep inside Russia, while high-tech drones have put its Black Sea fleet on the defensive.

In many ways, Ukraine is at the heart of this election, political analysts and opposition figures say. 

Putin wants to use his all-but-assured electoral victory as evidence that the war and his handling of it enjoys widespread support. 

Russian television and a sophisticated social media operation project Putin as a robust patriot and deride Western leaders such as Biden as weak, foolish and deceitful.

‘For many Russians, who are partly inspired by propaganda but most importantly by their own inner convictions, Russia is in an age-old struggle with the West – and what is currently happening is an episode in this struggle,’ said Alexei Levinson, head of sociocultural research at Levada.

‘Those who express such feelings in our surveys consider themselves to be participants in some way in this struggle with the West. They are like soccer fans who imagine they are participants in the soccer match.’

The opposition, meanwhile, hopes to use the vote to demonstrate their discontent with both the war and the Kremlin.

The Kremlin banned two politicians from the ballot who sought to run on an antiwar agenda and attracted genuine – albeit not overwhelming – support, thus depriving the voters of any choice on the ‘main issue of Russia’s political agenda,’ said political analyst Abbas Gallyamov, who used to work as Putin’s speechwriter.

Russia’s scattered opposition has urged those unhappy with Putin or the war to show up at the polls at noon on Sunday, the final day of voting, in protest. The strategy was endorsed by Navalny not long before his death.

‘We need to use election day to show that we exist and there are many of us, we are actual, living, real people and we are against Putin. What to do next is up to you. You can vote for any candidate except Putin. You could ruin your ballot,’ his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, said.

How well this strategy will work remains unclear.

Golos, Russia’s renowned independent election observer group, said in a report this week that authorities were ‘doing everything so that the people don’t notice the very fact of the election happening.’

The watchdog described the campaign ahead of the vote as ‘practically unnoticeable’ and ‘the most vapid’ since 2000, when Golos was founded and started monitoring elections in Russia.

Putin’s campaigning was cloaked in presidential activities, and other candidates were ‘demonstrably passive,’ the report said.

State media dedicated less airtime to the election than in 2018, when Putin was last elected, according to Golos. 

Instead of promoting the vote to ensure a desired turnout, authorities appear to be betting on pressuring voters they can control – for instance, Russians who work in state-run companies or institutions – to show up at the polls, the group said.

The watchdog itself has also been swept up in the crackdown: Its co-chair, Grigory Melkonyants, is in jail awaiting trial on charges widely seen as an attempt to pressure the group ahead of the election.

‘The current elections will not be able to reflect the real mood of the people,’ Golos said in the report. ‘The distance between citizens and decision-making about the fate of the country has become greater than ever.’