Russians head to the polls at noon in anti-Putin protest

Voting in the Russian presidential election continued on Sunday as Russians headed to the polls to cast their ballots at noon in a campaign to show the mass turnout of opposition voters.

The election, widely expected to hand Vladimir Putin his fifth term as president, is the first presidential election to be held over three days, from Friday to Sunday. Opposition leaders, including the late Alexey Navalny, previously called on Russians to come to their polling stations at noon on Sunday.

“We need to show we exist and there are a lot of us,” Navalny’s widow Yulia Navalnaya said in her address in early March.

Lines of people have been reported in Moscow, St. Petersburg and in the western Siberian city of Novosibirsk, with Novosibirsk authorities saying they had increased security measures at polling stations due to “provocative actions”. 

Russians are also lining up to vote abroad, with queues spotted in Istanbul and Kazakhstan’s capital Astana.