The Kremlin’s propaganda machine is running at full speed. Russian state television has shown so-called Western election observers at work, eating caviar and in good spirits. However, these are selected people and not OSCE officials.
The Perwy Channel filmed a delegation from Italy taking a look at the Luhansk region. In the also occupied region of Zaporizhia, French journalist Lucien Cerise said he did not trust the reports in the Western media and wanted to see for himself.
According to the Speaker of the Russian Parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin, 475 observers from 89 countries were deployed as election observers to monitor the vote. The number is considered very small to be able to monitor an election in the largest country in the world by area with eleven time zones in a truly comprehensible way.
OSCE excluded
The independent observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), whose monitoring is considered an international standard, were not even invited by the Russian side.
“If Putin had nothing to hide, he would at least allow transparency,” Green Party foreign policy spokeswoman Ewa Ernst-Dziedzic recently told krone.at. The OSCE election observer has serious doubts about the legitimacy of the results: “People are allowed to go to the polls, but the elimination of all opposition in recent years, the suppression of dissidents, the total control of the media space by the incumbent authorities, as well as the continued violations of freedom of expression, association and assembly cast doubt on whether these elections should be viewed and called as such.”
Caviar for election observers
Russian state television showed foreign observers being treated to caviar and other Russian specialties, with only positive comments about the organization of the elections.
People in the occupied Ukrainian regions of Kherson, Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhia also smiled into the cameras of state television and expressed their happiness at being able to participate in Russia’s presidential elections for the first time. They emphasized that they had no fear and firmly believed in Moscow’s victory in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, which had been going on for more than two years.
The three-day voting ends on Sunday evening with the closing of the last polling stations at 7pm CET in Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg) on the Baltic Sea. There are then direct predictions about the outcome of the election, which are based on voter surveys after the vote and which usually largely correspond to the outcome.
Source: Krone
I am Wallace Jones, an experienced journalist. I specialize in writing for the world section of Today Times Live. With over a decade of experience, I have developed an eye for detail when it comes to reporting on local and global stories. My passion lies in uncovering the truth through my investigative skills and creating thought-provoking content that resonates with readers worldwide.
