Woman Sets Fire to Polling Station in Putin's Tense Presidential Election

Video footage has been shared online of attacks on voting sites in Russia's presidential elections, including one in which a woman started a fire at a polling booth.

President Vladimir Putin is expected to win easily the tightly controlled presidential election that started on Friday and will finish on Sunday. However, in the absence of any genuine alternative contenders amid a clampdown on dissent, voters have expressed rebellion in other ways.

A clip from closed circuit TV showed an unnamed woman inside a polling station in the southern city of Volgograd igniting a piece of paper as she stood behind a curtain in the booth.

The woman then lobbed the paper into the air over hers and another cubicle so it landed on the ground. The flames then gathered strength, although the blaze appeared to be controllable.

There were other attacks on voting points; a woman in St. Petersburg threw a petrol bomb at the signboard of a polling station in the Moskovsky district, which caused a fire that was later extinguished.

In Moscow, footage showed a woman setting fire to a polling booth. Videos have shown other acts of vandalism, including a woman in the Russian capital pouring green liquid into a ballot box to spoil the votes cast. She was arrested and faces criminal charges for obstructing the election, Russian state media reported.

There were also voting protests in the Voronezh, Rostov and Karachay-Cherkessia regions, according to Alena Bulgakova, chair of the Russian Civic Chamber.

Russia's Investigative Committee said on Friday that at least three people had been charged with obstructing elections, which carries a sentence of up to five years. Russia's top elections official Ella Pamfilova denounced those who had tried to destroy the ballots as "scum," state news agency Tass reported.

With the opposition contenders broadly supportive of Kremlin policy, state-run polls point to Putin winning around three-quarters of the vote for the presidency whose term lasts until 2030. "The election is obviously a sham in terms of being a free, fair, or in any way even remotely democratic process," John Hall, professor of law, Fowler Law School, Chapman University, in Orange, California, told Newsweek.

"We can expect that Putin will focus on the election result as demonstrating an overwhelming pro-Russian sentiment among the people of the (Ukrainian) occupied territories," Hall said. "It is, of course, entirely in keeping with Putin's personality and his strategy to control the narrative."

Ukraine's National Resistance Center said it had orchestrated an explosion near a polling station in occupied Skadovsk, Kherson Oblast, at 3 p.m. on Friday, injuring five soldiers.

Russia has also organized voting in occupied Crimea and parts of Ukraine's Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts in violation of international law. Meanwhile, Ukrainian bombardments on Saturday killed two people in the Russian border region of Belgorod on Saturday, its governor said.

The website "Noon Against Putin" has called on Russians to turn up at the polls on Sunday at midday to express their discontent at the elections.

The idea proposed by an opposition politician has gained traction since the death in custody of Putin's toughest critic, Alexey Navalny, whose wife, Yulia Navalnaya, has supported the move.