Putin casts vote online as Russian presidential elections enter second day

March 16 (UPI) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin cast his vote online as weekend presidential elections denounced as a "sham" by his opponents and Western observers continued on Saturday,

The Kremlin released a photo and video of Putin voting online as he seeks an unprecedented fifth term in power in a switch from his traditional practice of making a visit to a polling station on election day.

The presidential election is being held Friday through Sunday both in the Russian Federation as well as in territories of eastern Ukraine occupied by invading Russian forces in a process that critics called a "loyalty check" for locals living in the region.

"For the first time, the polling stations are open for three days including remote online voting, which is available in almost a third of the regions," the Kremlin touted in its announcement of Putin's vote, adding that more than 4.5 million people have registered to vote via online polling.

Putin's opponents, meanwhile, have dismissed the online voting rollout as a possible means for making it harder to identify fraud in the results, Bloomberg reported.

On Friday's first day of voting, turnout in the country was 36.1%, according to election officials, with as many as 38.6 million people taking part in the voting -- including 3.4 million online.

Russian officials warned Saturday they would not stand for any "election interference" from "unfriendly powers," including the United States.

"Let me point out that the enemies' efforts cannot disrupt the elections of the President of Russia, which are successfully and actively conducted throughout the country as well as abroad," Russian Ambassador to Washington Anatoly Antonov said in a Telegram post.

Ukrainian intelligence cyber specialists told official media Saturday their hackers had succeeded in bringing down the Russian electronic voting system.

Putin is running alongside three other candidates but is all but assured another six-year term amid the bloody and brutal invasion of Ukraine, which has been ongoing since February 2022. He faces little to no opposition as Boris Nadezhdin, who has been a vocal critic of the war in Ukraine, was disqualified from running on a technicality, with election officials claiming he had failed to collect the required 100,000 signatures.

In the occupied areas of eastern Ukraine, including Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Luhansk, Donetsk, and Crimea, the holding of a presidential ballot has drawn strong criticism from Western backers of Kyiv.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield called it "a blatant propaganda exercise, undertaken in the hopes of somehow strengthening Russia's false claim to the parts of Ukraine it illegally invaded."

"To hold Russian elections in Ukraine's sovereign territory is proof of the tie between the Kremlin's external aggression and internal repression," she said in remarks to the Security Council on Friday. "It is an affront to the U.N. Charter principles that underpin global security and stability."

"Putin forcing Russia's sham election on illegally occupied regions of Ukraine is a disturbing reminder of what is at stake for Ukraine," British Defense Minister Grant Schapps wrote in a social media post.

"Whilst brave Ukrainians fight for freedom and democracy, Putin fights to force his tyrannical rule onto millions of innocents," he added.