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March 15 (UPI) -- Three days of voting got underway Friday in a presidential election in Russia in which incumbent Vladimir Putin is almost certain to win a third consecutive six-year term and his fourth as president in all. More than 80 million voters are expected to cast their ballots through Sunday at 94,000 polling stations across a vast territory covering 11 time zones and taking place in occupied parts of Ukraine and former soviet republics Moldova and Georgia.
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The first polling stations opened in the Far East in the Kamchatka and Chukotka regions 5,600 miles east of Moscow at 8 a.m. local time with the last shutting their doors at 8 p.m Sunday night, 770 miles west of Moscow in the Baltic Sea enclave of Kaliningrad, bordered by Lithuania to the north and Poland to the south and cut off from the rest of the country.
A total of 295 polling stations will open in 144 foreign locations ranging from the Baikonur Space Center in Kazakhstan to the Thai holiday island of Phuket where voters can cast their ballots inside the Russian consulate.
Putin is facing off against lawmakers Leonid Slutsky of the right-wing populist LDPR party, the Communist Party's Nikolay Kharitonov and Vladislav Davankov of the centrist New People party -- whittled down from a field of 33 candidates.
Several potential opponents including local Moscow city politician and Ukraine war opponent Boris Nadezhdin and independent candidate Yekaterina Duntsova were disqualified by the Central Electoral Commission due to "irregularities" with the public petitions endorsing their candidacies.
Since coming to office in 2013, Putin has consolidated his power by clamping down on opposition voices, democratic freedoms and the media and changing rules limiting the president from serving more than two terms, meaning he could run again in 2030.
Political repression has intensified since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 with criticizing the war made a criminal offense and a crackdown on the opposition, including on Alexei Navalny's Russia of the Future Party and his Anti-Corruption Foundation leading to his imprisonment and death in an Arctic prison in February.
His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, called Wednesday for Russian citizens to engage in protest voting to try to block a Putin sweep of the poll.
She urged Russians to form long lines at polling stations Sunday in a show of the depth of opposition and that they should vote for "any candidate except Putin", or spoil their ballot paper.
Electronic voting is being used for the first time in Moscow and 28 other regions with 4.7 million registered to cast their ballots electronically. A mobile voting service is also operating where election workers bring voting papers and ballot box to people unable to get to polling stations due to infirmity or illness.
Results from the online vote are expected between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. EDT on Sunday with the main results sometime later, or early Monday.
