MOSCOW, March 17 (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin won a record 88% in Russia's presidential election on Sunday, exit polls and first results showed, cementing his grip on power, though thousands of opponents staged a symbolic noon protest at polling stations.
The early result means Putin, who came to power in 1999, looks to have easily won a new six-year term that would enable him to overtake Josef Stalin and become Russia's longest-serving leader for more than 200 years.
Putin won 87.8% of the vote, the highest ever result in Russia's post-Soviet history, an exit poll by pollster FOM showed. The Russian Public Opinion Research Centre (VCIOM) put Putin on 87%. First official results indicated the polls were accurate.
Putin tightens grip on power in Russian election but thousands join noon protest
The election comes just over two years since Putin triggered the deadliest European conflict since World War Two by ordering the invasion of Ukraine. He casts it as a "special military operation".
War has hung over the three day election: Ukraine has repeatedly attacked oil refineries in Russia, shelled Russian regions and sought to pierce Russian borders with proxy forces - a move Putin said would not be left unpunished.
While Putin's re-election is not in doubt given his control over Russia and the absence of any real challengers, the former KGB spy wanted to show that he has the overwhelming support of Russians. Several hours before polls closed at 1800 GMT, the nationwide turnout surpassed 2018 levels of 67.5%.
Supporters of Putin's most prominent opponent Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison last month, had called on Russians to come out at a "Noon against Putin" protest to show their dissent against a leader they cast as a corrupt autocrat.
There was no independent tally of how many of Russia's 114 million voters took part in the opposition demonstrations, amid extremely tight security involving tens of thousands of police and security officials.
Reuters journalists saw an increase in the flow of voters, especially younger people, at noon at polling stations in Moscow, St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, with queues of several hundred people and even thousands.
Some said they were protesting, though there were few outward signs to distinguish them from ordinary voters.
As noon arrived across Asia and Europe, crowds hundreds strong gathered at polling stations at Russian diplomatic missions. Navalny's widow, Yulia, appeared at the Russian embassy in Berlin to cheers and chants of "Yulia, Yulia".
Exiled Navalny supporters broadcast footage on YouTube of protests inside Russia and abroad.
'PEOPLE SAW THEY WERE NOT ALONE'
"We showed ourselves, all of Russia and the whole world that Putin is not Russia that Putin has seized power in Russia," said Ruslan Shaveddinov of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation. "Our victory is that we, the people, defeated fear, we defeated solitude - many people saw they were not alone."
Leonid Volkov, an exiled Navalny aide who was attacked with a hammer last week in Vilnius, estimated hundreds of thousands of people had come out to polling stations in Moscow, St Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and other cities.
At least 74 people were arrested on Sunday across Russia, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors crackdowns on dissent.
Over the previous two days, there were scattered incidents of protest as some Russians set fire to voting booths or poured green dye into ballot boxes. Russian officials called them scumbags and traitors. Opponents posted some pictures of ballots spoiled with slogans insulting Putin.
But Navalny's death has left the opposition deprived of its most formidable leader, and other major opposition figures are abroad, in jail or dead.
The West casts Putin as an autocrat and a killer. U.S. President Joe Biden last month dubbed him a "crazy SOB". The International Criminal Court in the Hague has indicted him for the alleged war crime of abducting Ukrainian children, which the Kremlin denies.
Putin casts the war as part of a centuries-old battle with a declining and decadent West that he says humiliated Russia after the Cold War by encroaching on Moscow's sphere of influence.
"Putin's task is now to imprint his worldview indelibly into the minds of the Russian political establishment" to ensure a like-minded successor, Nikolas Gvosdev, director of the National Security Program at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, told the Russia Matters project.
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