Russia: Vladimir Putin’s party wins elections with 54.2% votes

United Russia benefits from its association with 63-year-old Putin, who after 17 years in power as either president or prime minister, enjoys a personal approval rating of about 80 percent, opinion polls show.

Most voters do not see any viable alternative to Putin and his allies, and they fear a return to the chaos and instability of the 1990s, the period immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, if his rule ends.

Many voters are persuaded by the Kremlin narrative, frequently repeated on state TV, of the West using sanctions to try to wreck the economy in revenge for Moscow’s seizure of Crimea, the Ukrainian region it annexed in 2014.

Yevgeny Korsak, a 65-year-old pensioner in the city of Saransk, 600 km (375 miles) south-east of Moscow, said he had voted for United Russia “because it is strong and powerful.”

Putin has said it is too early to say if he will go for what would be a fourth presidential term in 2018. If he did and won, he would be in power until 2024, longer than Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, the longest-serving Soviet leader aside from Joseph Stalin.

The election is the first time that voters in Crimea are helping decide the makeup of the Duma.