Russia-Ukraine war: Volodymyr Zelenskiy holds call with Emmanuel Macron while he visits Argentina – as it happened | Ukraine

With the Kremlin in full control of state media and able to decide who can and cannot run, the Navalny camp says this is not a real election.

But it sees the 100-day campaign window as a rare opportunity to draw Russians into a political conversation and convince them that the Ukraine war and the economic strains it has brought are problems of Putin’s making.

“Of course it’s impossible to beat Putin in the ‘elections’,” top Navalny aide Leonid Volkov told Reuters. “The aim of our campaign is to change the political agenda in Russia.”…

So far only three people have declared their intention to run against him. Two are low-profile figures, Boris Nadezhdin and Yekaterina Duntsova, who may struggle to gather the 300,000 signatures required to support their candidacies.

The third, nationalist Igor Girkin, is in jail awaiting trial on a charge of inciting extremist activity …

With the lineup still unclear, the Navalny camp has launched its campaign by simply urging Russians to vote against the incumbent.

“We don’t have our own candidate. We had a candidate, Navalny, and they refused to register him, tried to kill him and put him in prison. Now we have, so to speak, a collective candidate ‘against Putin’,” said Lyubov Sobol, a close Navalny associate.