He was always going to win but what does Vladimir Putin's landslide victory mean for Russia
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It was an election he was always destined to win.
Vladimir Putin ’s rumoured girlfriend was even spotted casting her vote in the Russian presidential election on Sunday.
Gymnast Alina Kabaeva remained tight-lipped over who she backed, but added: “He will surely win.”
She was right. Putin then won the Russian Presidential election by a landslide.
Exit poll RIA puts his victory at 76.3% of the vote, VTsIOM has his success at 73.9% and TASS reported a figure of 71.9%.
Putin was vying for a new six-year term to make him the longest-serving Kremlin leader since feared Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
But what does it all mean for Russia and the rest of the word? Here Russian academic and historian Yuri Felshtinsky examines...
How President Putin kept a hold of his country
(Image: Barcroft Media)
The Russia election result was exactly what I expected. I thought Putin would get around 75% of the vote as the competing parties have to be seen to be given something.
Putin has not lost any support because of what happened in Britain in the past few weeks. Most people across Russia only collect information from controlled TV channels.
We are dealing with a high-level propaganda machine. Many Russians, definitely more than 50%, believe enemies are around, that everybody wants to destroy and humiliate Russia, and that Putin is protecting Russia, making it independent and stronger every day.
It is possible the timing of the poisoning is linked to the elections. If other recent deaths in Skripal’s family were not connected to his poisoning, a decision was probably made to do it just prior to the election.
This would be a case of military intelligence wanting to settle old scores, knowing the West is going to retaliate.
Whatever the scenario, it is impossible to presume Putin would not have been informed of this operation. The law passed in 2006 giving the FSB the power to kill enemies abroad has the caveat that it can only take place with permission of the president.
(Image: Getty)
The election process was always corrupt in Russia, in 1993 when Boris Yeltsin became president and in 2000 when Putin was elected for the first time. But now they have completely killed it. From 2004 there has been no room for real opposition at all.
Every time the Kremlin or FSB realise there is a potential leader for the opposition, they deal with him physically. This happened with Boris Nemtsov, killed in Moscow in 2015.
Several opposition leaders have died in questionable circumstances.
(Image: REUTERS)
With Alexei Navalny, they arrested him for crimes he never committed and through this he lost the constitutional right to stand for president.
Likewise, there are no political parties that can seriously mount an opposition.
Putin is supposedly a member of the biggest party but it is only the biggest because he is in it.
He holds all the power himself; he is above everything and everyone else.