PUTIN CONFIRMS RUN FOR RUSSIAN PRESIDENCY IN 2024 ELECTION

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that he will run in the 2024 presidential election, state news agency TASS reported on Friday.

Putin, 71, announced his decision to seek to extend his rule of 24 years as prime minister or president following an awards ceremony for army personnel at the Kremlin, state-run news agencies reported.

After awarding Ukraine war veterans with Russia’s highest military honour, the Hero of Russia gold star, a lieutenant colonel named Artyom Zhoga, commander of the Sparta Battalion, asked the president to run again.

“He will run,” Zhoga told reporters after the event.

“The president agreed,” the Kommersant daily’s Kremlin correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov said.

Earlier, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov also said that many people have urged Putin to run.

Putin was handed the presidency by Boris Yeltsin on the last day of 1999, and has already served as president for longer than any other ruler of Russia since Josef Stalin, beating even Leonid Brezhnev’s 18-year tenure.

Russia’s Federation Council upper house approved on Thursday a date of March 17 for the vote.

Opposition politicians cast the election as one that threatens democracy and adorns what they see as the corrupt dictatorship of Putin’s Russia.

The war in Ukraine which has triggered sanctions from the West, and a failed mutiny by Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, in June, are also set to challenge the Kremlin chief’s standing in the upcoming elections.

But according to some independent polling, support for Putin remains strong with the Russian leader enjoying approval ratings of above 80%.

His supporters say that Putin has restored order and some of the clout Russia lost during the chaos of the Soviet collapse.