Summary:
- New term would keep him in power until at least 2030
- Putin, 71, faces many challenges in new term
- Some polls show Putin has approval ratings over 80%
- Putin has served four presidential terms since 2000
- Russia to vote on March 15-17
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday told soldiers who had fought in the Ukraine war that he would run for president again in the 2024 election, a move that will allow the former KGB spy to stay in power until at least 2030.
Putin, who was handed the presidency by Boris Yeltsin on the last day of 1999, has already served as president for longer than any other ruler of Russia since Josef Stalin, beating even Leonid Brezhnev’s 18-year tenure.
After Putin awarded the Ukraine war veterans with Russia’s highest military honour, the Hero of Russia gold star, Artyom Zhoga, a lieutenant colonel born in Soviet-era Ukraine who fights for Russia, asked the president to run again.
“I will not hide that I have had different thoughts at different times but it is now time to make a decision,” Putin told Zhoga and the other decorated soldiers. “I understand that there is no other way.”
“I will run for the post of president,” Putin was shown in television footage saying in the gilded Georgievsky Hall, part of the Grand Kremlin Palace.
Zhoga told reporters afterwards that he was very glad Putin had assented to the request, adding that all of Russia would support the decision.
Reuters reported last month that Putin had decided to run.
For Putin, 71, the election is a formality: with the support of the state, the state-run media and almost no mainstream public dissent, he is certain to win.
