- By Carl Schreck
Security Stepped Up In Moscow For Vote
Moscow police say that more than 17,000 security officers, private security contractors, and volunteers will be mobilized to keep order in the Russian capital for the March 18 presidential election.
The press office of the Moscow city police added that in the run-up to the ballot, there security sweeps -- including with police dogs -- will be conducted at all polling stations in the capital, the state-run TASS news agency reported on March 13.
Following the election of President Vladimir Putin in 2012, large-scale opposition protests in Moscow led to mass arrests and convictions of demonstrators whom rights groups have called political prisoners.
Putin is set to coast to reelection in the first round of the March 18 ballot.
Tomsk Police Grab Navalny Material
Police in the Siberian city of Tomsk on March 14 confiscated leaflets issued by opposition politician Aleksei Navalny from the car of his local coordinator, Ksenia Fadeyeva, RFE/RL's Siberia Desk reported.
Fadeyeva told RFE/RL that she was stopped by a traffic police officer and the leaflets, which were about six months old, were seized while her documents were being examined.
On February 10, police carried out a raid of Navalny's office in Tomsk, saying they had received a tip that there were "extremist" materials at the location.
- By Carl Schreck
Seek And Ye Shall Find
The Kaliningrad office of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny says police conducted a search their and allegedly found a pack of ballots ahead of the March 18 presidential election.
Activists there say they believe someone planted the 60 supposed ballots that police say they found in the bathroom of their office in the Russian exclave, calling it a "provocation," Current Time television reported on March 14.
They said in a statement that the documents confiscated in the March 13 raid merely "look like" ballots.
Regional police said authorities have opened a probe into the matter.
The head of Navalny's Kaliningrad headquarters was taken in for questioning and was accused of violating laws on public demonstrations in connection with a January protest spearheaded by Navalny, Current Time reported.
Navalny was barred from running in the election due to a criminal conviction he calls politically motivated. He is calling for a boycott of the March 18 ballot that President Vladimir Putin is set to win in a landslide.
Wrong URL
Election officials in Belgorod are a little embarrassed.
According to the local Belgorod No. 1 newspaper, officials distributed 1.2 million copies of a flier urging people to vote in the March 18 presidential election.
But the flier set voters to a nonexistent website, www.belizbirkom.ru. Unfortunately for the officials, the first ones to notice and react were supporters of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny.
They quickly registered the website and set it to redirect to Navalny's website, where they can read about his call for voters to boycott the election, which he has dismissed as "the reappointment of Vladimir Putin."
The head of the local election commission, Nikolai Pletnyov, promised to rectify the situation by having workers tape over the erroneous URL with the correct one by hand on the remaining undistributed fliers.
Belgorad No. 1's reaction to that response: "This is not a joke."
Crimean Tatars Report Election Coercion
The Crimean Human Rights Group on March 12 published a report documenting several cases in which Crimean Tatars were reportedly being intimidated to participate in the March 18 Russian presidential election.
Ukraine has declared the election illegal in the Russia-occupied Ukrainian region of Crimea. The Crimean Tatar governing organ, the Mejlis, which is banned in Crimea by the de facto Russian authorities, has also issued a statement saying that the election violates international and Ukrainian law and claims the authorities are using "threats and intimidation" to compel locals to vote.
"Threats to fire Crimean Tatars from their jobs for refusing to participate in the election are a gross violation of social-economic rights and an example of ethnic discrimination," Olha Skrypnyk, head of the Crimean Human Rights Group, was quoted as saying.
According to the group, management at a senior citizens' residence called a meeting of only Crimean Tatar employees and said that anyone who refused to vote would be "dismissed at their own request."
Students at one school reported being assigned to create posters for the election on the theme -- "Mama, Papa, and I -- the whole family participates in the election." Children were instructed to take a picture of their parents holding their poster at the polling station on election day.
In another school, teachers have been ordered to organize an exhibition of photographs taken at polling stations and were ordered to vote themselves or face discipline.
More From Generation Putin
Yesterday we reported on a project by the BBC's Russian Service to interview 18-year-old Russians who are eligible to vote for the first time on March 18 and who have spent their entire lives in Putin's Russia.
The Moscow Times has a similar project in English, featuring 18 young Russians from across the country.
"I really don't care who is president, so I am not going to vote," said Nikita Fuga of Krasnoturansk. "In six years, Putin will still be in power and all of our money will go into strengthening the military. But, whatever. That doesn't concern me. As long as I can do what I want, it's fine. And in 10 years, something will definitely change."
"Putin or no Putin, nothing is going to change in this country," said Arina Bikbulatova, a model from Ufa. "I'm not going to vote. I don't understand anything about politics, and I don't think that a single vote could change anything. In six years, I'll be living abroad anyway."
More Activists Detained
Current Time TV reports that four more opposition activists have been detained, with at least one detention reportedly playing out more like an abduction from a Liam Neeson film.
Blast From The Past
With President Putin all but assured of a fourth presidential term, some archivists thought it was a good time to remind us of the momentous events of August 9, 1999, when then-President Boris Yeltsin named Putin as his successor, saying he was the only person "capable of uniting the country."
Here are those events, as reported by the then-independent NTV television channel, when moderators felt obligated to tell audiences who Putin was.
- By Mike Eckel
Putin Videos 'Not A Violation Because We Don't Regulate The Web'
There have been a spate of Vladimir Putin videos and documentaries popping up on social media in recent weeks, including Facebook, VK, and Odnoklassniki. Andrei Kondrashov’s two-hour documentary released over the weekend is only the latest example.
All those videos, however, are prompting complaints from some Russians, saying it amounts to free campaign advertising for the incumbent, in violation of Russian election law.
Not so, says the head of the Central Election Commission, Ella Pamfilova, because Russian election law does not regulate the Internet. “We will think about the future after the election. But for now, whether you like the law or not, whether it is good or bad, we are acting in strict accordance with it,” Pamfilova was quoted by Interfax as saying. “This is not a violation, because we don’t regulate the Internet.”