Moscow
The Kremlin said on Thursday Russians had shown how much they trusted President Vladimir Putin with a nationwide vote that gave him the right to run for two more terms while people wondered whether he really would stay on until 2036. Announcing final results of the week-long vote, officials said nearly 78 per cent of voters had backed changes to the constitution allowing Putin, whose fourth term as president ends in 2024, to run for two more back-to-back six-year terms. That means that the 67-year-old former KGB officer, who has ruled Russia for over two decades as either president or prime minister, could be in power until he is 83. An independent monitoring group said the vote was deeply flawed but Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, said the emphatic nature of the result was a measure of how deeply Russians trusted Putin to run the country.–Agencies
