Page 15 - Russia OUTLOOK 2024

opposition candidates are left are fissiparous and given to fighting amongst themselves, fragmenting the protest vote into ineffective shards.
Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service reportedly added designations to opposition leaders Navalny, Leonid Volkov and Ivan Zhdanov that accuse them of involvement in “terrorism” in December. Navalny, who is currently serving a 19-year sentence, said previously that a military court is reviewing terrorism charges against him that he suspects will result in a life sentence.
Election fraud
The vote is very unlikely to be fair and free. Russian elections have always been marred by blatant ballot stuffing, but after a system of electronic voting was introduced in 2021 parliamentary elections, the art of fixing the results has been raised to a new and much more effective level.
Famous Russian statistician Sergey Shpilkin has decisively demonstrated proof of vote rigging in several of Russia’s previous elections and has caused several scandals in the past by highlighting discrepancies in the voting patterns that strongly suggest vote rigging. He is credited with helping to inflame Russian voters' anger over the blatant vote rigging in the 2011 Duma election that led to large-scale street protests in the Russian capital.
The electronic voting system was only used in a handful of regions in 2021, but it has been expanded to cover 17 of Russia’s 62 regions for the presidential election covering the majority of the voting population.
For example, exit polls in the 2021 elections showed that Russia’s Communist Party had decisively won the election in Moscow, only to see the result overturned by the electronic vote count the next day.
War in Ukraine
Russia seems to have solved its manpower shortages as of the end of 2023 by raising salaries for contract soldiers and introducing partial mobilisation. But problems remain. The New Voice of Ukraine has written up a good summary of the main military action in 2023 here.
“The issue of rotation and the lack of people to carry it out will remain a factor in the coming year,” military analyst Michael Kofman said on X (formerly Twitter) in December.
Throughout 2023 Moscow took the decision to avoid a second wave of mobilisation after the 300,000 conscripted in September 2022, and instead focused efforts on a huge recruitment drive to sign up voluntary contract soldiers. The Kremlin believes it made the right choice. During the meeting, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said in December roughly 490,000 people had enlisted in the year and that there were plans to expand recruitment to 745,000 in 2024.
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