The presidential election in Russia entered its third and final day on Sunday, with President Vladimir Putin widely expected to easily seal another six-year term in office.
Voting on Sunday was marked in part by anti-Putin protesters, who turned out to voting locations at exactly noon as a sign of opposition to the 71-year-old Kremlin strongman, who has dominated Russian politics for almost a quarter of a century.
The Kremlin has organized the vote in such a way as to demonstrate the population's supposedly high level of trust in Putin and support for his war against Ukraine.
According to independent electoral law experts in Russia and abroad, the conditions for the vote are neither free nor fair: The opposition is excluded and the three authorized opposing candidates are considered loyal to the Kremlin.
Leading opposition politicians were removed from the ballot, have been driven into exile abroad, or are imprisoned in Russia.
Police in Russia arrested dozens of people who joined the midday protests, with the OVD-Info human rights media project counting around 50 arrests up to early afternoon, half of them in Kazan, a city on the Volga River some 700 kilometres east of Moscow.
Arrests were also reported in Moscow and St Petersburg. Russian authorities had warned against joining the campaign, which they say would show "signs of extremist activity."
Backers of the "Noon against Putin" protest include supporters of Alexei Navalny, the activist who died in a penal colony in the Polar Circle last month.
Navalny's widow, Yulia Navalnaya, helped call for the noon protests and joined a demonstration outside the Russian embassy in Berlin, where more than 2,000 Russians living in Germany queued to vote at noon.
The circumstances of Navalny's death remain unclear, with many Putin critics and Western countries blaming the Kremlin.
Another Kremlin critic, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who lives in exile in the United Kingdom, also joined the protest in Berlin.
Anti-Putin Russian activists living abroad staged further demonstrations around the world.
Within Russia, numerous reports show that pressure is being exerted on citizens to take part in the election.
The Russian state news agency TASS reported on Sunday morning that turnout had already surpassed the previous presidential election in 2018 with more than 67% of the approximately 114 million eligible voters casting ballots either in person or online.
The elections are taking place across 11 time zones in the world's largest country by area.
The first polling stations opened in the easternmost regions of Chukotka and the Kamchatka Peninsula at 2000 GMT on Saturday; the last ones in the Baltic Sea exclave of Kaliningrad are due to close on Sunday evening at 1800 GMT, after which exit polls and initial counts are to be released.
The final count is expected to be completed by Monday morning.
Internationally, the fact that the sham election is also being held in the occupied Ukrainian territories has been particularly criticized. Russia has annexed these territories in violation of international law.
According to local Russian authorities, a Ukrainian drone struck a polling place in the Russian-occupied region of Zaporizhzhya in south-eastern Ukraine on Sunday. There were no reported injuries.
