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No one was taken by surprise when Putin was re-elected as president of the Russian Federation in March 2024. Everything had been put in place to guarantee an overwhelming victory in the most rigged and unfree Russian elections since the demise of the Soviet Union. The elections took place amidst the ravaging war in Ukraine, giving them an additional dimension. They were not simply set up as a plebiscite for the president, but also as an endorsement of Russia's war against Ukraine and a proof of unity in this crisis context. Elections in an authoritarian context could easily be mistaken for an annoying inevitability for a regime that wants to keep up democratic appearances. The opposite is true. The elections were an opportunity for the regime to celebrate Russia's ‘democracy’. This article seeks to understand why this is the case. It starts by sketching the context in which the elections took place and how they were manipulated. In the next section, the elections are put into the wider context of radicalising repression, symbolised by the death of main oppositionist Navalny in captivity 1 month before the ballot. This prepares the ground for taking a bird's eye view of the autocratic evolution of Russia's regime and the role elections play within this authoritarian context. Finally, the question is raised how the war against Ukraine mattered for the elections. The analysis draws on studies on authoritarianism and on both the conceptual framework and the data of the V-Dem Institute (V-Dem Dataset, 2025; V-Dem Institute, 2024). Russia's 1993 constitution provided for a limitation of a president's rule to two consecutive terms. This was the reason why Putin stepped aside as President from 2008 to 2012, when he became Prime Minister, switching roles with Dmitry Medvedev. To prevent that Putin's presidential rule would come to an end in 2024 (after two more terms of 6 years each), constitutional amendments were adopted in 2020 that maintained the restriction of presidential rule to two terms but set the counter back to zero for former presidents (Pomeranz, 2021, p. 17). This makes it possible for Putin to stay in power until 2036. The 2020 constitutional amendments were part of a broader attempt at consolidating the regime and reinforcing the power vertical, making the super-presidential system ‘even more concentrated’ (Pomeranz, 2021, p. 25) and further restricting civil rights. Pomerantz assesses the significance of the changes: ‘the sanctity and democratic promise of the 1993 constitution has now been violated on numerous fronts. The division of powers, political turnover, the elevation of international law within the Russian legal system, the independent judiciary—all these founding principles have now been shattered and/or severely compromised by the amendments. … Putin has now tried to limit the public arena where open political discussion can take place. The constitutional amendments have been swiftly followed by new restrictive laws on meetings, NGOs, and foreign agents’ (Pomeranz, 2021, pp. 25–26). A second set of measures had to do with ‘electoral engineering’ and the manipulation of the electoral process.1 The March 2024 presidential elections were the most rigged elections ever since demise of the Soviet Union (Fischer, 2024; Galeotti, 2024). The manipulation happened both prior to the elections and during the election process itself. First of all, there was control of who could participate in the elections. To be admitted, candidates who did not run for a party represented in the Duma needed to collect 100,000 signatures, of which no more than 2500 could originate from a single region (Fischer, 2024, p. 2). The hurdles for independent candidates were even higher (the support of 500 public figures and 300,000 signatures). Whilst several candidates submitted the required signatures to the Central Election Commission, they were still excluded on the basis of administrative ‘errors’. The most notable case was that of Boris Nadezhdin, who had collected twice the number of requested signatures. This reduced the number of candidates running to Putin and three pro forma candidates – out of 15 who had applied. None of the three ‘alternative’ candidates had a real opposition agenda. None of them spoke out against the war. One of the candidates, Nikolay Kharitonov (of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation), even stated openly that he would not criticise Putin (TASS, 2023). This time the elections lasted 3 days (15–17 March 2024), leaving more time for interventions. There were multiple reports on forced voting. People in the occupied territories in Ukraine were forced to vote, even by armed men (on this, see, for example, Shevchenko, 2024). The Russian election-monitoring organisation Golos, banned in Russia, reported about the use of geolocation software to control whether people in the state sector would effectively vote (Grigoryev, 2024). Furthermore, hard to control electronic voting was substantially extended. There was no election monitoring by international organisations or independent civil society groups. Moreover, the elections were held in the most unfree climate ever in post-communist Russia. As will be elaborated below, they happened in a context of severe repression, in which civil liberties had been curtailed and in which key oppositionists had either been detained or killed. There were no independent media, far-reaching censorship, propaganda and media control. Leaked documents revealed how ‘Project Purge’, for example, aimed at identifying and eliminating opposition material on social media (Grigoryev, 2024). Already ahead of the elections, there were leaks that revealed that a target had been set for the presidential elections of a 70% turnout with 80%–85% of the votes for Putin (see, amongst others, Pertsev, 2024). Eventually, Putin won the elections with, according to the official numbers, a turnout of 77% and a record 87% of the votes – well exceeding the targets (see Table 1). In sum, compared to earlier elections in post-communist Russia, these were the most unfree elections held. Whereas previous elections left space for some ‘competitive niches’ (Fischer, 2024, p. 6), these elections reflected almost complete control, in a climate of fear and repression. Whilst in the past, when elements of competition in the electoral process survived, there was a lot of disagreement on how to label the Russian regime, today, there is fairly broad consensus about its authoritarian nature and its increasing personalisation (Burkhardt, 2021; Gel'man, 2021; Klimovich, 2023; and others). Gel'man speaks of ‘electoral authoritarianism under personalist rule’ (Gel'man, 2021, p. 71). Burkhardt refers to ‘expedited regime personalization’ and ‘a highly personalized authoritarian regime with a constitutionally unconstrained presidency’ (Burkhardt, 2021, p. 50). This personalisation of power goes hand in hand with the erosion of institutions (Klimovich, 2023; McFaul, 2018). Golosov goes one step further and sees ‘a staged transformation from electoral authoritarianism with relatively strong, albeit mostly informal, constraints on the exercise of executive power to a full-fledged personalist dictatorship’ (Golosov, 2023, p. 390). The V-Dem Institute uses a typology of four main types of regimes: liberal democracy, electoral democracy, electoral autocracy and closed autocracy. Russia is classified as ‘electoral autocracy’ (V-Dem Institute, 2024, p. 12), which is defined as a system where elections are held, but there are ‘insufficient levels of fundamental requisites such as freedom of expression and association, and free and fair elections’ (V-Dem Institute, 2024, p. 12). Russia is ranked 159th out of 179 countries on the institute's Liberal Democracy Index (LDI),2 with a score of 0.06 (V-Dem Institute, 2024, p. 63). Looking back in time, there is a continuous pattern of degradation, with the LDI in steady decline since 2000 (V-Dem Dataset, 2025).3 This indicates that the autocratisation of Russia was not suddenly boosted by the constitutional changes of 2020 or by the war in Ukraine, but is a longer term trend. The V-Dem Institute refers to Russia as an example of ‘post-Soviet consolidation of autocracy’ (V-Dem Institute, 2024, p. 10). Yet, some nuance needs to be added. Where we do see a more abrupt change – after years of gradual degeneration – is on indices related to civil liberties and media freedom (V-Dem Dataset, 2025). Indices of media freedom show a drastic increase of government censorship after 2019 and of media bias after 2021. The radicalised propaganda and government control on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine and during the war have certainly been a key factor in this process. The degree of disinformation reached unprecedented levels with the invasion, whereby the Kremlin's propaganda reflected ‘unsubstantiated allegations or completely fictional accounts’ on a scale that allowed the regime to ‘fabricate’ the war (Johansson-Nogués and Şimanschi, 2023, p. 2016). This was supported by campaigns that aimed to mould collective memory through the rewriting of history school books or enforcing ‘patriotic’ themes upon the entertainment sector. When it comes to the repression of civil society organisations, there was a strong deterioration after 2018 and V-Dem's freedom of association index shows a sharp decline after 2020 (V-Dem Dataset, 2025). Repressive legislation on foreign agents and undesirable organisations radicalised a legal system that already restricted civil rights in a far-reaching way. The ‘foreign agent law’ in its original version dates back to 2012. It was gradually expanded and a new law in 2022 replaced all previous legislation on ‘foreign agents’, with a new, more oppressive law. In 2024, the European Court of Human Rights stated in a judgement no less than that this legislation ‘bears the hallmarks of a totalitarian regime’ (European Court of Human Rights, 2024). With the war against Ukraine, the repression went a step further. In an attempt to silence any critical voices about Russia's aggression, political offenses were reclassified in the legal system, resulting in more court cases on the basis of offenses like ‘state treason’, ‘extremism’ or ‘terrorism’. The latter imply much longer prison sentences. Furthermore, new articles were added to the criminal code for ‘disinformation’ and ‘discrediting the armed forces’. They left a lot of room for arbitrary rulings because of their vague definition of the offenses. One of the leading opposition figures, Vladimir Kara-Murza, for example, was charged in 2022 for discrediting the army and for treason, simply for speaking out against the war in Ukraine. He was convicted to 25 years in prison.4 Aleksandr Cherkasov, chair of the human rights group Memorial and one of the winners of the Nobel peace prize in 2022, estimates that there are more court cases for political offenses now than during the Brezhnev era (Cherkasov in Meduza, 2023). Actions taken outside the ‘legal’ framework need to be added to this legal oppressive approach, most spectacularly the death of main oppositionist Alexei Navalny in custody, 1 month before the elections. All this was part of a campaign to eradicate the extra-systemic opposition. In sum, the current climate of repression is the result of a year-long degradation of civil liberties and increase of active repression in Russia. The war against Ukraine has not set this into motion but has certainly radicalised and intensified existing tendencies. The level of repression has now reached an unprecedented level in post-communist Russia. Human Rights Watch (2023) spoke of ‘supersized repression’. The V-Dem Institute concluded in its 2024 report that ‘Russia has virtually eradicated political opposition and independent media, while political repression is so harsh that it is leaving virtually no corner of the society untouched’ (V-Dem Institute, 2024, p. 29). Russia has thus gone through a process of autocratisation, personalisation of power, erosion of institutions and boosting repression. You would expect a regime with this track record to keep low profile on democracy. Counter-intuitively, this is not the case in Russia. The elections were celebrated as a sign that Russia was – in the words of Kremlin spokesman Peskov – the ‘best’ democracy in the world (Peskov quoted in Leven, 2024). But also outside election time, Russia glorified its ‘democracy’. On the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, on 4 February 2022, Russia and China agreed on a Joint Statement on ‘a New Era in International Relations and Global Sustainable Development’ (Joint Statement, 2022). The first section of this strategic partnership declaration is a fairly extended text on democracy in which Russia and China claim to represent ‘genuine democracy’. Both countries are said to ‘have long-standing traditions of democracy, which rely on thousand-years of experience of development, broad popular support and consideration of the needs and interests of citizens’. They reject the Western ‘one-size-fits-all template’ for democracy, claiming the sovereign right for a state to choose its own form of democracy. The text condemns the West's ‘abuse of democratic values and interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states under the pretext of protecting democracy and human rights’, which they see as exertion of hegemony and a threat to stability in the world (Joint Statement, 2022). Hence, there is something puzzling about Russia's urge to make a claim to be the true representative of democracy in the world, whilst having such a poor record. Why does the Kremlin give the elections such a pre-eminent place, if the context is clearly not democratic by any standard? Why is democracy not a taboo topic? Delegitimising Western dominance – as in the joint statement with China – is certainly one reason, but there are also domestic reasons. Most importantly, the term democracy is maintained to refer to the ideal image of a plebiscitary system, in which a strong leader gets the overwhelming, six-yearly approval of the population. In the absence of the minimal democratic conditions, this takes the form of an ‘authoritarian plebiscite, a rubber stamp’ (Fischer, 2024, p. 1). It is the hallmark of what former advisor to Putin and former Deputy Prime Minster Vladislav Surkov has called Putinism. According to Surkov, Putin has the ‘ability to hear and to understand the nation, to see all the way through it, through its entire depth’ (Surkov quoted in Pynnöniemi, 2019). The people have no other political role to play than the ‘constant performance of trust in the leader’ (Pynnöniemi, 2019). As a result, the system gets devoid of individual choice or of the idea of competing political preferences. Putin has become the embodiment of the will of the people, that expresses itself in a six-yearly endorsement ballot. This ideal image is well reflected in Dugin's proposal for a political science curriculum in higher education. He presents Russia's political system as a ‘strong, personified presidential system vested in one leader who derives legitimacy from popular backing’ (Dugin, quoted in Pertsev, 2025). This ideal of a ‘plebiscitary democracy’ is both the most stable and an ‘inevitable’ model for Russia. Rotating power, the trias politica or checks and balances only undermine the strength of the state. Against the background of this ideal image of public endorsement of a strong leader, the regime used the elections exactly to demonstrate its legitimacy and the broad popular support for Putin. 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Tom Casier (Tue,) studied this question.