MOSCOW  -  Vladimir Putin said Russia would not be “intimidated” as he hailed an election victory that paves the way for the former spy to become the lon­gest-serving Russian leader in more than 200 years.

All of the 71-year old’s major op­ponents are dead, in prison or exiled, and he has overseen an unrelenting crackdown on anybody who publicly opposes his rule or his military offen­sive on Ukraine. “I want to thank all of you and all citizens of the country for your support and this trust,” Putin said early Monday morning in a news conference at his campaign head­quarters in Moscow hours after polls closed. “No matter who or how much they want to intimidate us, no mat­ter who or how much they want to suppress us, our will, our conscious­ness -- no one has ever succeeded in anything like this in history. It has not worked now and will not work in the future. Never,” he added.

With more than 80 percent of vot­ing stations having submitted results, Putin had secured 87.2 percent of all votes cast, official election data showed -- a record victory in a presi­dential election where he faced no genuine competition.

The three-day election was marked by a surge in deadly Ukrainian bom­bardments, incursions into Russian territory by pro-Kyiv sabotage groups and vandalism at polling stations.

The Kremlin had cast the election as a moment for Russians to throw their weight behind the full-scale military operation in Ukraine, where voting is also being staged in Rus­sian-controlled territories.

Putin singled out Russian troops fighting in Ukraine for special thanks in his post-election speech in Mos­cow. And he was unrelenting in claiming his forces had a major ad­vantage on the battlefield, even after a week which saw Ukraine mount some of its most significant aerial attacks on Russia and in which pro-Ukrainian militias barraged Russian border villages with armed raids. “The initiative belongs entirely to the Russian armed forces. In some areas, our guys are just mowing them -- the enemy -- down,” he said. Kyiv and its allies slammed the vote -- which was also staged in parts of Ukraine under Russian forces’ control -- as a sham. President Volodymyr Zelen­sky lashed out at Putin as a “dicta­tor” who was “drunk from power”.

“There is no evil he will not com­mit to prolong his personal power,” Zelensky said. As early as Friday, the first day of voting in the election, EU chief Charles Michel had sarcastically congratulated Putin on his “landslide victory”. If he completes another full Kremlin term, Putin will have stayed in power longer than any Russian leader since Catherine the Great in the 18th century. Allies of the late Alexei Navalny -- Putin’s most promi­nent rival, who died in an Arctic prison last month -- had tried to spoil his inevitable victory, urging voters to flood polling stations at noon and spoil their ballots. His wife, Yulia Na­valnaya, was greeted by supporters with flowers and applause in Berlin. 

After voting at the Russian embas­sy, she said she had written her late husband’s name on her ballot.

Some voters in Moscow answered the call from the opposition, telling AFP they had come to honour Navalny’s memory and show their opposition in the only legal way possible. “I came to show that there are many of us, that we exist, that we are not some insignificant minority,” said 19-year-old student Ar­tem Minasyan at a polling station in central Moscow.