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March 17 (UPI) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin thanked voters for their faith in him as he won a fifth term in office in a election that has been widely discredited as illegitimate. The results show Putin with 87% of the votes cast, according to Russia's Central Election Commission, Russian news agency TASS reported.
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Putin, who has been in power for nearly a quarter of a century, is set to extend his rule for another six years.
"We have a lot of specific, important tasks ahead," Putin said in a speech to supporters Sunday. "The result of the election signifies trust on the part of the country's citizens and their hope that we will do just as we planned."
In the face of a crackdown on dissent, Russians gathered at polling stations Sunday, the last day to cast a ballot in an election that realistically offered voters no alternative to Putin.
Many people at the voting locations had followed widespread calls for protest to the lack of alternatives to Putin, whose opponents are either in jail, in exile or dead. His chief critic, Alexei Navalny, died amid suspicious circumstances in an Arctic prison earlier this month.
Navalny's associates urged people unhappy with Putin's war against Ukraine to protest by going to the polls at noon on Sunday. Lines appeared to grow outside polling stations inside Russia and at its embassies around the world at about that time.
Navalny's widow, Yulia Navalnaya, was among those who protested outside the Russian Embassy in Berlin as some people in the crowd applauded and chanted her name.
She told reporters that she wrote her late husband's name on the ballot after spending more than five hours in line to cast her ballot.
"Please stop asking for messages from me or from somebody for Mr. Putin," she told the assembled reporters who asked questions. "There could be no negotiations and nothing with Mr. Putin, because he's a killer, he's a gangster."
Poll monitoring group OVD-Info said at least 80 Russian protesters were arrested.
Governments of Western countries lined up in opposition to the Russian vote, calling it neither free nor fair.
Germany called it a "pseudo-election" under an authoritarian ruler reliant on censorship, repression and violence.
Britain's Foreign Secretary David Cameron condemned the vote, stating it lacked both opposition and independent monitoring by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
It also included illegal polling in Ukrainian territory, he said.
"This is not what free and fair elections look like," he said in a statement.
In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky described the contest as a simulation of an election.
"Everyone in the world understands that this figure, as has often happened in history, has simply become addicted to power and is doing everything he can to rule forever," Zelensky said in his nightly address on Sunday.
"There is no evil he will not commit to prolong his personal power. And there is no one in the world who is safe from this.
The election took place amid attacks on Russia by Ukrainian missiles and drones, which have killed several people. Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago, its second attempt in less than a decade to take control of the country. Ukraine has sought international aid to continue its resistance and has proved to be a more difficult opponent than experts thought.
