Long lines of Russian voters indicate dissatisfaction with Putin’s rule

Long lines of voters formed outside polling stations in major Russian cities during Sunday’s presidential election, in what opposition figures portrayed as a high-profile protest against a rubber-stamp process sure to keep Vladimir V. Putin in power.

Before he died last month, Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny had called on his supporters to go to polling stations on Sunday afternoon, the last day of the three-day vote, to express their dissatisfaction with Mr Putin, who is set to go vote. wins his fifth presidential term in a vote without real competition.

Navalny’s team, which continues its work, and other opposition movements renewed calls for protest in the weeks leading up to the vote. Simply showing up at the polls for an initiative known as Noon Against Putin, they said, was the only sure way to express discontent in a country that has dramatically escalated repression since the massive invasion of Ukraine two years ago.

Opposition leaders said showing solidarity with like-minded citizens through mere presence was more important than what voters wanted to do with their ballots because there was no real choice in the election.

“This is our protest – we have no other options,” said Lena, 61, who showed up at a polling station in central Moscow before noon with the intention of spoiling her ballot. “All of us decent people are hostages here.” Like other voters interviewed, she declined to give her last name for fear of reprisals.

Alissa, 25, said she came because she is against the war. “It’s so important to see people who think like you, who don’t agree with what’s happening,” she said.

Noon against Putin, originally proposed by an exiled former regional Russian lawmaker, became a rallying cry for Russia’s embattled opposition after Mr. Navalny’s death in an Arctic prison last month. His widow and political heir, Yulia Navalnaya, has presented the initiative as a way to honor his legacy and protest his death, which she blamed on the government.

“Our goal is to work to unite people and find new forms of political action,” Leonid Volkov, one of Mr Navalny’s top aides, said during live coverage of the vote on the YouTube channel Mr Navalny. The value of Noon Against Putin is bringing together people who may be afraid to express their opinions in public, he added.

In the broadcast, Mr. Volkov wore a sling around his arm. He was taken to hospital last week after being beaten with a hammer outside his home in Lithuania, a reminder of the dangers the opposition faces even in exile.

The nature of the afternoon initiative makes it virtually impossible to estimate how many people came to the polls at the time with the intention of registering a protest. More broadly, the muted, purely symbolic form of civil disobedience presented by the imitation underlines 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 that more than 60 people across Russia were arrested for election-related actions in Moscow on Sunday at 3 p.m.

Despite the risks, all five voters polled by The New York Times said outside a polling station in Moscow that they came to express 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 rang from a nearby church. “We should be the ones with the power here, but unfortunately in our country the person in power is a murderer. He killed our Lyosha,” she said, using a nickname for Mr. Navalny, for whom she had once worked as a volunteer.

Kristina later sent a photo of a ballot that she said she spoiled before placing it in the ballot box. The candidate choices bore the words “Navalny, we support you” in capital letters. Soon after, she was briefly detained by authorities, who said they asked her why she had been standing near the polling station for “so long.”

Long lines were also seen at Russian embassies in countries with a large Russian diaspora. Noon Against Putin was expected to be particularly large-scale abroad, as dissident voters outside Russia were less at risk.

Ms Navalnaya was seen in a long queue outside the Russian embassy in Berlin on Sunday afternoon. And around the same time, several hundred voters formed a line outside the embassy in Riga, Latvia, despite document checks by local police. Latvia’s government has called the Russian elections a sham and tried to discourage Russia’s large ethnic population from participating.

Tomas Dapkus And Anton Trojanovsky reporting contributed.