Vladimir Putin officially registers as candidate for March 15 Russian election

Jan. 29 (UPI) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin formally registered as a candidate for the country's next presidential election that is scheduled for March 15, Moscow's federal election authority announced Monday.

Russia's Central Election Commission confirmed Putin's official entry into the race after the incumbent nominated himself for an unprecedented fifth term on top of his nearly 25-year reign.

Putin's formal ballot registration comes more than a month after he announced his candidacy during a Kremlin ceremony on Dec. 8, saying "I will run for president of the Russian Federation."

CEC Chairperson Ella Pamfilova announced Monday that Putin's candidacy was "adopted unanimously" following a process that authenticated the signatures of hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens who support Putin.

In accordance with Russian law, CEC Secretary Natalya Budarina confirmed that 60,000 signatures supporting Putin were randomly selected for verification from a collection of 315,000 signatures.

"As a result of the verification, 91 signatures of the 60,000 were declared invalid due to incorrect information about voters," Budarina said.

Also, no fake signatures were detected, Budarina said, meaning Putin met the threshold to appear on the ballot with 314,909 valid signatures.

"The 91 invalid signatures make up 0.15% of the verified ones," she noted.

The vote is set to take place more than two years into Russia's war with Ukraine, with regions illegally annexed by Moscow since the start of the conflict in February 2022 to be included in the vote.

Putin was a late arrival to the registration process as three other candidates had already thrown a hat in the ring before him, including Leonid Slutsky of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, Vladislav Davankov of New People, and Nikolay Kharitonov of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.

Anti-war candidate Boris Nadezhdin currently has reportedly gathered enough signatures to meet the ballot requirements, but the election authority has not yet granted approval for his inclusion, and the specific reasons for this decision remain undisclosed.

Wednesday is the deadline to submit signatures to enter the race.

Assuming no unforeseen events, Putin, who has held power since 1999 as both president and prime minister, is likely to secure another six-year term.

Russia previously had term limits, but a constitutional amendment passed in 2021 enables Putin to seek two additional six-year terms, potentially extending his rule until at least 2036.

The international community continues to level claims that Moscow persistently manipulates its elections to consolidate Putin's grip on power.

The Kremlin also has a notorious reputation for leveraging politically motivated charges against opposition figures to thwart challenges to Putin, as demonstrated by a series of attacks and arrests that targeted Alexei Navalny in the run-up to the last presidential election in 2018.

Putin rose to power on Dec. 31, 1999, when President Boris Yeltsin resigned, and Putin, who had been serving as prime minister, assumed the presidency.

He has since become the most dominant figure in Russian politics since Josef Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union for nearly three decades, from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953.