THE Vladimir Putin, re-elected president of Russia and inaugurated his fifth term with threats and warnings against Kiev and the West.

No one doubts that the powerful – for a quarter of a century – occupant of the Kremlin will not use the astronomical 87.28% of the vote as evidence of mass acceptance and support for both him and his regime.

According to the British BBC network, it signals a strong mandate in favor of Russia’s war in Ukraine but also in favor of the direction the country is following. It also sends a strong message to the Russian elite that there is only one man in charge in Russia and this, as the BBC’s Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg points out, is important as it comes just months after the Wagner mutiny exposed cracks in the Putin government.

According to the European edition of Politico, however, this Russian presidential election, in which any opposition voice is either exiled, imprisoned or dead, threatens the domestic political stabilization that Vladimir Putin so craves.

After all, he notes, his new term begins at a time when silent protests against him were held in approximately 95,000 polling stations throughout the country and also in Russian embassies abroad. A move that Western political scientists are reading as a sign that Russian resistance has not yet atrophied and that the image that Vladimir Putin himself sought to preserve has finally tarnished.

Information indicates that demonstrators who participated in these protests were taken into custody while, the image of Alexei Navalny’s widow, Yulia, outside the Russian embassy in Berlin went around the world for six hours.

Last night the president of Russia made a second public appearance after the announcement of the election result.

With the Kremlin in the background, he stood in front of a packed Red Square in the heart of the Russian capital to celebrate 10 years since the annexation of the Crimean peninsula underlining that “the return to the homeland turned out to be more difficult, more tragic” but, as he said, “we managed and it is now a great event in the history of our nation.”

On his side stood his opponents, who, throughout the pre-election period, did not pretend either that they hope, or that they can win this electoral contest.

The West insists that these presidential elections in Russia were “neither free nor fair” while, analysts point out that even the dead voted as participation climbed to 77.44%, a record for the post-Soviet era.

But for Vladimir Putin, this election was the moment when, as he emphasized on Sunday night, “the source of power” in Russia was “the Russian people.”