The ballot coincided with the fourth anniversary of the reunification of the peninsula with Russia.
According to partial results made public by the electoral commission, Vladimir Putin is now leading with over 76 percent of the vote, well above the simple majority needed to avoid a run-off. Eight candidates were vying for the post of president.
The Russian leader thanked his supporters from the stage in the Red Square after he visited ballot station number 2151 in the Russian Academy of Sciences on Moscow’s Kosygina Street.
A mass festival was meanwhile organised in Simferopol over the weekend, something that has become a tradition for the town’s inhabitants to celebrate the anniversary of the Crimean referendum outcome to rejoin Russia.
The governor of Sevastopol, Dmitry Ovsyannikov, along with his family also cast their ballots. He noted the enthusiasm of Sevastopol voters with long queues lining up at polling stations. Ovsyannikov said in the State Duma elections and also when the governor was elected, the queues were much shorter. “The election of the president is significant for every Sevastopol resident,” the governor commented, adding that the situation at other polling stations in the city was much the same.
The elections in Crimea and Sevastopol were monitored by officially accredited observers, including international observers. On Saturday, citizens of France, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, Israel, Sweden, Ukraine and Cyprus arrived in Crimea. Additionally, some 3 600 public observers were deployed in the peninsula.
Sadly in Ukraine, authorities prevented Russian citizens from voting. Vasily Volkov, the head of the territorial electoral commission, which manages the activities of election commissions abroad, said the move could anger Europeans.
“To be honest, it does not fit into our heads that you can just flout international law, conventions, agreements on this issue,” Volkov said.
“We still hope that Ukraine and its authorities will share the European values to which they aspire so actively,” he said. “It is unlikely that Europe will like this approach of Ukraine when they say that our citizens in Ukraine cannot vote in the elections.”
The Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, Arsen Avakov, had declared earlier that Russian citizens would not be allowed to enter diplomatic missions of their country to vote in the presidential elections on March 18.
The Russian embassy in Kiev reported that it had sent a note to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine demanding that the diplomatic missions and consulates of the Russian Federation carry out their functions without hindrance in organising and holding elections in four locations there.
According to Vasily Likhachev, a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Russian Federation, the ban by Ukraine violate the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and Immunities of 1961, as well as the bilateral convention on consular interaction between Moscow and Kiev. Some 72 000 Russian citizens are registered at the Consulate, Likhachev added.
Elsewhere in the Russian Federation, voters lined up as polls opened from the Far East region of Kamchatka to the western exclave of Kaliningrad.
The vote will last for a total of 22 hours, as Russians across all the country’s 11 time zones are given an opportunity to cast their ballots.
Семья-рекордсмен из 30 человек проголосовала в Волгоградской области.
Избирательная комиссия участка в селе Крутинский Михайловского района сегодня встречала многодетную семью Потаповых.
Голосовать они приехали дружно, в хорошем настроении…https://t.co/WjwAZmyOcY pic.twitter.com/cFzfiz5pIv— Гелярий Гражевич (@qeleotron) March 18, 2018