1 of 1 Russian President Vladimir Putin on August 24, 2023 in Moscow Photo: Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin via Portal Russian President Vladimir Putin on August 24, 2023 in Moscow Photo: Sputnik /Mikhail Klimentyev/ Kremlin via Portal
Vladimir Putin, 71, has decided to run in March’s presidential election, a move that will keep him in power until at least 2030. The Kremlin chief believes he must preside over Russia at its most dangerous time in decades, six sources told Portal.
Putin, who succeeded Boris Yeltsin on the last day of 1999, served as president longer than any other Russian ruler since Joseph Stalin, even surpassing Leonid Brezhnev’s 18year term.
The sources, who spoke to Portal on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of Kremlin politics, said advisers were preparing for Putin’s reelection.
The Russian president claims that 80% of the population supports his government. Furthermore, he claims that his candidacy will have the support of the state and state media and that almost no one will oppose his government so he believes he will win the election.
“The decision has been made he will run,” said one of the sources. The official announcement is expected in the coming weeks, a source told the Russian newspaper Kommersant last month.
Four other sources also confirmed Putin’s candidacy.
Although many diplomats expect Putin to remain in power for life, they have not yet confirmed his plans to run in the March 2024 presidential election.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment. Peskov said in September that no one would be able to compete with him if Putin decided to run.
While Putin is unlikely to face any real competition in the election, the former KGB spy faces the biggest challenges a Kremlin leader has faced since Mikhail Gorbachev’s confrontation with the crumbling Soviet Union more than three decades ago.
The war in Ukraine has sparked the biggest confrontation with the West since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962; Western sanctions have inflicted the biggest external shock on the Russian economy in decades; and Putin faced a failed mutiny in June by Russia’s most powerful mercenary, Yevgeny Prigozhin.
The West classifies Putin as a war criminal.
For some Russians, however, the war highlighted how fragmented Russia has been since the postSoviet era.
Jailed Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, for example, says that Putin has led Russia down a strategic dead end to ruin and built a fragile, corrupt system that will ultimately cause chaos.
“Russia is in the process of backtracking,” Oleg Orlov, one of Russia’s most respected human rights activists, told Portal in July. “We left communist totalitarianism, but now we have returned to a different kind of totalitarianism.”
It is estimated that in just over a year and a half of the war, thousands of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers died or were injured the number is higher than in other wars in which Russia has participated.