International Desk

Russians are casting their ballots across the country's 11 time zones, the start of a three-day election that is almost certain to hand Vladimir Putin six more years at the helm of the world's biggest nuclear power, report AFP and Reuters.

Amid the Ukraine war, the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War Two, the 71-year-old Kremlin chief dominates Russia's political landscape and none of the other three candidates on the ballot paper presents any credible challenge.The Kremlin says Putin, in power as president or prime minister since the last day of 1999, will win as he commands broad support for rescuing Russia from post-Soviet chaos and standing up to what it says is an arrogant, hostile West.

From Chukotka on the Pacific 6,300 km away from Moscow to the Kaliningrad exclave on the Baltic Sea bordering Poland, some of Russia's more than 190 ethnic groups turned out to vote in national costume.In Yakutsk, an eastern Siberian city where the temperature was -18 degrees Celsius, the descendent of a Yukaghir shaman asked spirits to bring good luck to the winner of the election during a ceremony at one polling station.

In other Russian cities, one woman dressed up as Barbie and another came to a polling station dressed in a tiger outfit.

But the shadow of the Ukraine war hangs over the election: Russia has more than one million men in arms and several hundred thousand fighting a grinding artillery and drone war along the 1,000 km front line in Ukraine.

Three children were killed by Ukrainian shelling of the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk, the mayor said. Another was killed in the Russian region of Belgorod - a reminder of the toll of the war.

Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, who direct Russia's war effort, voted in Russia's southern military district.

More than 114 million Russians are eligible to vote, including in what Moscow calls its "new territories" - four regions of Ukraine that its forces only partly control, but which it has claimed as part of Russia.

Ukraine says the staging of elections there is illegal and void.

EU chief Charles Michel sarcastically congratulated Putin on winning re-election against no real opposition.

"Would like to congratulate Vladimir Putin on his landslide victory in the elections starting today," Mr Michel wrote on X.

"No opposition. No freedom. No choice."

Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of conflict in eastern Ukraine between Kyiv's forces on one side and pro-Russian Ukrainians and Russian proxies on the other.

If Putin completes a new six-year term, he will overtake Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to become Russia's longest-serving ruler since Empress Catherine the Great in the 18th century.

The West views Putin as an autocrat, a war criminal, a killer who US officials say has enslaved Russia in a corrupt dictatorship that is driving it to strategic ruin.

Under constitutional changes that voters approved in 2020, Putin will be eligible to run for yet another term in 2030, potentially extending his rule to 2036.