Russia’s scattered opposition has urged those unhappy with Putin or the war to express their protest by coming to the polls at noon on Sunday. The strategy was endorsed by Navalny not long before his death.Voting is taking place at polling stations across the vast country’s 11 time zones, in illegally annexed regions of Ukraine, and online. Despite tight controls, at least a half-dozen cases of vandalism at polling stations were reported on Friday and Saturday.A 50-year-old university professor was imprisoned Saturday for 15 days after she tried to throw green liquid into a ballot box in the Urals city of Ekaterinburg, local news site Ura.ru reported. In Podolsk, a town close to Moscow, a woman was fined 30,000 rubles ($342) and charged with “discrediting the Russian army” after spoiling her ballot with an unspecified message, according to OVD-Info, a police monitoring group.Ahead of the election, Putin cast his war in Ukraine, now in its third year, as a life-or-death battle against the West seeking to break up Russia.Putin has boasted about recent gains in Ukraine, where Russian troops have made slow advances relying on their edge in firepower. Ukraine has fought back by intensifying cross-border shelling and raids, and by launching drone strikes deep inside Russia.
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