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#AceNewsRoom With ‘Kindness & Wisdom’ Sept, 11, 2022 @acebreakingnews

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#AceBreakingNews – MOSCOW — Russians began voting on Friday in the first nationwide elections since the invasion of Ukraine, as the Kremlin tried to assure the public that it was business as usual despite a climate of wartime censorship and repression.

The vote for local and regional governments across the country includes the first municipal-level elections in Moscow, the capital, since 2017, when the opposition won a sizable minority of seats despite the Kremlin’s dominance of the political system and accusations of fraud. But the ranks of the opposition have since been depleted as anti-government politicians have fled the country and others have been arrested or blocked from running.

Although President Vladimir V. Putin has dominated Russian politics for two decades, he has long relied on elections with a semblance of competition to try to legitimize the rule of his United Russia party.

And while those elections were rife with fraud, the vote-counting process in major cities like Moscow retained a modicum of transparency, making them an opportunity for Kremlin critics to express their discontent even if a major opposition victory was virtually impossible.

After the upheaval in Russia’s economy from inflation and international sanctions over the war in Ukraine, the question is whether that logic still holds.

Mr. Putin has done everything in his power, critics say, to prevent his opponents from being able to repeat even their modest success of five years ago.

“Finally for the first time, elections are totally senseless,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace based in Moscow. Almost no one is allowed to participate, he added, referring to the opposition.

The elections, which are being held over three days on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, are also a test of the jailed opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny’s ability to influence Russian politics from prison.

Despite the Russian authorities’ crackdown on the opposition, some low-profile critics of the Kremlin and of the Ukraine war remain on the ballot. And while they are unlikely to win, Mr. Navalny’s advisers said they believed the Kremlin would be hard-pressed to paper over a strong showing by some of them that would convey disapproval of the war.

“It is very difficult for Moscow to organize some kind of total falsification system at polling stations,” one exiled adviser to Mr. Navalny, Vladimir Milov, said in a phone interview from Vilnius, Lithuania. “I see great enthusiasm from activists, candidates and many voters, and even in these conditions, they want to do something.”

— Valerie Hopkins, Anton Troianovski and Alina Lobzina

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