Vladimir Putin has claimed victory in presidential elections after appearing before tens of thousands of chanting supporters in the capital, Moscow. Election monitors say the polls were tainted by widespread violations.
Polling group VTsIOM reported shortly after polling stations closed that Putin had garnered some 58 percent support, with his closest rival, Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, receiving 17 percent.
Nationalist candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky was scoring 8.0 percent, whilst tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov was sitting on 7.6 percent, the early results showed.
The figures were taken from Russia's far east and Siberia, where polling booths closed hours before they closed in the European west of the country.
Over 100,000 supporters of Putin rallied outside the Kremlin to celebrate the former KGB agent's expected victory.
Vladivastok's polling stations wer among the first to close
Opposition groups said they were planning a rally in Moscow on Monday to protest the election results.
In the troubled Caucasus region of Dagestan, three policemen were reportedly killed in an attack on a polling station after voting came to an end.
Vote-rigging claims
Tens of thousands of monitors were observing the election on Sunday, with many posting evidence of voting irregularities.
The website control2012.ru, a group that coordinated monitors' work, listed over 3,300 violations in the afternoon, and independent election watchdog Golos published an interactive online map with over 2,000 suspected violations.
"These elections are not free ... we will not recognize the president as legitimate," said Mikhail Kasyanov, who was Vladimir Putin's first prime minister and later went into opposition.
Opposition parties said they were seeing widespread evidence of electoral fraud. On their websites they published accounts of ballot-stuffing and individual voters casting ballots at multiple polling stations. Some voters in Vladivostock arrived at their polling stations only to find that their ballots had already been cast, one account said.
Putin's campaign chief, Stanislav Govorukhin, hailed the vote as "the cleanest election in Russia's entire history," adding that "the violations our rivals and the opponents of our president will now speak of are laughable."
Officials had outfitted polling stations across the country with webcams to help counter allegations of vote-rigging. Those registered can watch the events live at webvybory2012.ru. It was, however, unclear whether evidence from the cameras would hold up under scrutiny.
'Crystal-clear voting'
Throughout the day, Central Election Commission Chairman Vladimir Churkov had made statements saying the election was running smoothly and dismissed allegations of foul play. He said turnout was above 60 percent.
"We appear to be on track to have turnout better than in the last parliamentary election," he said. "The voting is crystal clear and clean," Churkov told RTR television.
Putin previously served as president from 2000-2008, stepping aside due to term limits. His protégé, Dmitry Medvedev, then assumed the presidency and Putin became premier. Medvedev is expected to be named prime minister if Putin succeeds in regaining the presidency.
dfm, ncy/gb (AFP, dpa, AP)
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