Russia presidential polls: US trying to meddle

President Vladimir Putin's foreign intelligence service yesterday accused the United States of trying to meddle in Russia's presidential election and said that Washington even had plans to launch a cyberattack on the online voting system.

 

Putin, who is almost certain to win the March 15-17 presidential election, has warned the West that any attempts by foreign powers to meddle in the ballot would be considered an act of aggression, according to Reuters.

Russia's SVR Foreign Intelligence Service said in a statement it had information that US President Joe Biden's administration had set out to meddle in the election, state media reported.

"According to information received by the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation, the administration of J. Biden is setting a task for American NGOs to achieve a decrease in turnout," the SVR was cited as saying.

"With the participation of leading American IT specialists, it is planned to carry out cyberattacks on the remote electronic voting system, which will make it impossible to count the votes of a significant proportion of Russian voters," the SVR said.

The SVR, the main successor to the KGB's First Directorate foreign spying service, did not set out any evidence for its assertions. There was no immediate reaction from Washington.

The West casts Putin as a dictator, a war criminal and a killer who has led Russia into an imperial-style land grab that has weakened Russia and forged Ukrainian statehood, while uniting the West and handing Nato a post-Cold War mission.

Putin casts the Ukraine war as an existential battle between a "sacred" Russian civilisation and an arrogant West which he says is in cultural, political and economic decline and which sought to humiliate Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The Kremlin last week said that Russia will not meddle in the November US presidential election, and dismissed American findings that Moscow orchestrated campaigns to sway both the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections.

Putin, Russia's paramount leader since the last day of 1999, has dropped a series of ironic remarks about the US election, saying that he finds Joe Biden preferable as the next US president to Donald Trump.

Elsewhere, Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg said yesterday that Sweden's accession to the US-led alliance showed Russian President Vladimir Putin had "failed" in his Ukrainian war strategy of weakening it, reports AFP.

The Kremlin's invasion not only prompted formerly non-aligned nations Sweden and Finland to come under Nato's defence umbrella, but now "Ukraine is closer to Nato membership than ever before," Stoltenberg said.

His comments, made next to Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, came just before Sweden's flag was run up a flagpole at Nato's Brussels headquarters in a ceremony sealing Sweden becoming the alliance's 32nd member country.

"When President Putin launched his full-scale invasion two years ago, he wanted less Nato and more control over his neighbours. He wanted to destroy Ukraine as a sovereign state, but he failed," Stoltenberg said.

"Nato is bigger and stronger," he said.

Finland joined Nato last year, swiftly after applying.

Sweden's adhesion took longer as Nato members Turkey and Hungary held up the process. But Ankara in January and Budapest last week finally gave their formal assent.