'Debate' Begins

State radio and TV starting today are giving free airtime to candidates, prescribed as one-third of the allocated time for political parties who nominated candidates, another third for candidate ads, and the remaining third for debates.

Continuing his "less is more" approach from his Kremlin perch, Putin has said he won't participate in any of the debates.

It's no secret who gets the lion's share of favorable coverage in state TV broadcasts, as Carl Schreck reported on January 17:

50 Ways To Love Your Putin: Russian TV Fawns Over Election Drive

An independent Russian election-monitoring group has accused television networks -- primarily state-controlled -- of violating election laws by delivering free campaign advertising for President Vladimir Putin ahead of the March presidential election he is widely expected to win.

Golos, which Russia authorities have designated a "foreign agent" under a controversial law on nongovernmental organizations, alleged this week that federal, regional, and local networks have aired dozens of segments in recent weeks that constitute "illegal campaigning" for Putin.

These reports, which focus mainly on a nationwide "volunteer" drive to collect the 300,000 valid signatures Putin must submit to register as an independent for the March 18 election, feature clearly slanted reporting in Putin’s favor and, in most cases, are not connected to his job as president, Golos said in a January 16 statement.

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Russian Voting In Crimea Vexes Kyiv

Russia plans to open balloting precincts and voting places on the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014. The election in fact also falls on the anniversary of the annexation.

Not surprisingly, Ukraine is none too happy about any of it. Foreign Minister Pavel Klimkin has sent a formal note of protest to Moscow complaining about that, as well as reported efforts to conduct balloting in parts of Ukraine’s eastern regions, where a war between Russia-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces has been ongoing since just after the Crimean annexation.

Ekho Moskvy quotes Central Election Commission head Ella Pamfilova saying the free airtime on state broadcasters translates into 60 hours of TV and 36 hours of radio time for each of the eight candidates.

Russia's 'Tsar-Sultan War-Chief' Seen Facing Major Challenges

Russian academic Nikolai Petrov argues in a recent paper for George Washington University’s Ponars Eurasia program that Putin -- whom he calls "Tsar-Sultan War-Chief" -- faces deep problems assuming he triumphs in next month’s election (as nearly all experts predict).

“The Russian political system is beset by a certain stasis and the president is in a legitimacy trap,” Petrov, a professor of comparative politics at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, writes in Russia On The Eve Of Its Presidential Election: How Long Can Change and Stasis Coexist? Any major postelection moves that Putin makes to push Russia out of its deepening structural problems, he says, risks putting the country’s governing system out of balance.

Running Away From His Record

Police in the Urals town of Verkhny Ufalei have been confiscating small signs that appeared recently on the walls of six shops owned by local entrepreneur Nikolai Korshunov.

The signs feature a portrait of President Putin and note that he has run the country since 2000. It then plays on one of Putin's favorite slogans, the idea that he "raised Russia off its knees" during his long rule by providing local "examples." It then lists local enterprises and social institutions that purportedly have been shut down since 2000 -- a list that amounted to 40 points, a notable achievement for a town of just 31,000 people.

Local media posted photographs of the damaged walls that police left behind in their zeal to maintain public order.

Korshunov was quoted as saying he now awaits a summons to the police for further explanation.

United Russia Steps Up Effort To Get Out The Vote

The push to boost turnout in the March 18 presidential election rolls on in Russia. The Kommersant daily today reports that President Putin's ruling United Russia party is requiring its members to bring a certain number of people out to the polls. The higher one's rank in the party, the more voters he or she is required to mobilize. Party officials told the newspaper that no one is being pressured to vote for Putin, who is running as an independent and expected to win in a landslide.

Navalny Team's Dark March

In a piece headlined Alexey Navalny Heads Back To Court Next Monday, And He'll Probably Spend Election Day In Jail, Meduza notes the convenience for Putin of a March 5 arraignment day for the president's most vocal critic. Here's Meduza:

As expected, Alexey Navalny will likely spend Russia’s Election Day behind bars. Moscow’s Tver Court has announced that he will be arraigned on Monday, March 5, for repeatedly violating statutes on public assemblies.

On January 28, Navalny helped organize nationwide rallies to promote a voters’ boycott of the presidential election. If given the maximum jail sentence, he wouldn’t go free until April 4 — seventeen days after Vladimir Putin’s almost certain re-election. Jailing Navalny roughly two weeks before the vote and for more than two weeks afterwards is presumably the authorities’ strategy for suppressing potential anti-Kremlin protests.

On February 22, Navalny’s campaign manager and right-hand man Leonid Volkov was jailed for 30 days on the same charges. He won’t go free until March 24, six days after the vote.

Suspicions Of 'Bots' Grow Over Spikes In 'Dislikes' Of Russian Stories Ahead Of Election

By Alan Crosby

When Zmitser Yahorau saw the number of "dislikes" for a Belsat TV story on YouTube about life in a Russian village, something looked wrong. Once the independent online news station's deputy editor in chief saw the data behind the numbers, he knew the problem -- "bots."

After the story was posted on January 30, it took only two days for the video to receive some 24,000 dislikes, compared with fewer than 2,000 likes.

A week later, as the station dug deeper into the numbers, they said all of the evidence pointed toward a "bot" attack against the story, most likely by pro-Russian sources unhappy with the content put out by the Warsaw-based channel for its Belarusian-language broadcast and online programs.

"The proportion between dislikes and views looks very suspicious. As a rule, people rarely click 'like' or 'dislike' on YouTube. The disproportion was evident, and we decided to find out from which countries people who actively disliked the post are. And we got curious statistical data," Yahorau says.

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Sexual Harassment Becomes A Campaign Issue

The allegations appear to be escalating against senior Duma deputy Leonid Slutsky, with a journalist from RTVI, a privately owned New York-based Russian-language broadcaster, saying on air that the lawmaker groped her and tried to kiss her in his office.

Here's our story from yesterday, highlighting candidate Sobchak's call for a sexual-harassment probe into the actions of Slutsky, chairman of the State Duma’s International Relations Committee.

Pro-Putin demonstrators recruited with promises of cash

An effort appears to be under way to boost numbers at an upcoming rally for President Putin by paying people to attend.

An ad on a Russian website frequently used to find demonstrators-for-hire says it has now wrapped up its recruitment for the planned March 3 rally at Moscow's Luzhniki Stadium. The announcement promises 500 rubles ($8.85) to men and women between the ages of 20 and 55 years old.

The tactic of paying demonstrators to attend rallies, known in Russian as "massovka," is not new to Russia's political scene. The last time Putin was on the ballot -- in 2012 -- there were also numerous claims that many participants in a pro-Putin rally ahead of the vote were paid.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said this week that Putin himself might show up to the rally, which he said was organized by the incumbent's campaign.

Russian journalist Vladimir Varfolomeyev, a Kremlin critic, quipped on Twitter that he'd like to look at the campaign-spending reports.

"I'd like to see the line in there that says: 'payment for massovka,'" Varfolomeyev wrote.