Russian voters formed long lines outside polling stations in major cities during Sunday’s presidential election, with many saying they heeded opposition leaders’ call to protest the process that will keep Vladimir V. Putin firmly in power. .
Before he died last month, Russian opposition leader Alexei A. Navalny had called on his supporters to go to the polls at noon on Sunday, the final day of three days of voting, to express their displeasure with Mr. Putin, who he is set to win his fifth presidential term in a vote that lacks real competition.
Mr Navalny’s group, which continues his work, and other opposition movements repeated calls for protest in the weeks before the vote. Simply showing up at the polling station, for an initiative known as Noon Against Putin, they said, was the only safe way to express discontent in a country that has sharply escalated repression since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago.
Opposition leaders said showing solidarity with like-minded citizens by simply showing up was more important than what voters chose to do with their ballots because the election had no real choice.
“This is our protest — we have no other options,” said Lena, 61, who came to a polling station in central Moscow before noon with the intention of spoiling her ballot. “All us decent people are held hostage here.” Like other voters interviewed, she declined to give her last name for fear of retaliation.
Alissa, 25, said she came because she is against the war. “It’s so important to see like-minded people who don’t agree with what’s going on,” he said.
Noon Against Putin, originally proposed by an exiled former regional Russian lawmaker, became a rallying call for Russia’s opposition after Mr Navalny’s death in an Arctic prison last month. His widow and political heir, Yulia Navalny, presented the initiative as a way to honor his legacy and protest his death, which she blamed on the government.
“You saw each other. The world has seen you,” Leonid Volkov, one of Mr. Navalny’s top aides, he wrote in a note on social media thanking the supporters who came out at noon. “Russia is not Putin. Russia is you.”
Mr Volkov live-streamed the vote on Mr Navalny’s YouTube channel earlier on Sunday and wore a sling around his arm. He was taken to hospital last week after being hit with a hammer outside his home in Lithuania, a reminder of the dangers facing the opposition, even in exile.
The nature of the midday initiative makes it virtually impossible to estimate how many of the people who came to the polls at that time came with the intention of protesting. But around 11:30 A.M. Moscow time, the street outside the polling station on Brodnikov Lane, just south of the city’s famed Tretyakov Gallery, was relatively empty. Suddenly, at noon, a long line formed.
More generally, the silent, purely symbolic form of civil disobedience envisioned by the initiative underscores how little the Russian opposition can do to influence events in the country amid widespread repression.
The government has vowed to punish attempts to disrupt the vote. And a Russian human rights and legal aid group, OVD-Info, said more than 70 people were arrested across Russia on Sunday for election-related actions.
Despite the risks, all five voters interviewed by The New York Times outside a polling station in Moscow said they had come to show their support for Mr. Navalny. “According to the Russian Constitution, the source of power is the Russian people,” said one voter, Kristina, 22, as the noon bells of a nearby church rang. “We are supposed to be the ones in power here, but unfortunately in our country the man in power is a murderer. He killed our Lyosa,” she said, using a nickname for Mr Navalny, for whom she had once worked as a volunteer.
Christina later sent a photo of a ballot she said was spoiled before she deposited it in the ballot box. It had the words “Navalni, we are with you”, written in capital letters on the candidate’s choices. Soon after, she was briefly detained by authorities, who she said asked her why she “spent so long” near the polling station.
Long queues were also seen at Russian embassies in countries with a large Russian diaspora. The anti-Putin rally is expected to be particularly large-scale abroad because dissident voters faced fewer risks outside Russia.
Ms Navalnaya was seen standing in a long queue outside the Russian embassy in Berlin on Sunday afternoon. And around the same time, several hundred voters formed a queue outside the embassy in Riga, Latvia, despite document checks carried out by local police. Latvia’s government called the Russian election a fraud and tried to discourage its large Russian population from voting.
Valerie Hopkins, Thomas Dapkus and Anton Trojanowski contributed to the report.
