MOSCOW: A Ukrainian missile attack killed two people in western Russia, and a separate drone strike set an oil refinery ablaze on Saturday, the second day of an election that President Vladimir Putin has accused Kyiv of trying to disrupt.

The Ukraine war has cast a shadow over the three-day presidential election, which is all but certain to hand Putin six more years in the Kremlin .

In the Belgorod region, where cross-border attacks from Ukraine have become part of daily life, the governor reported the deaths of a man and a woman.

Video obtained by Reuters showed fires ablaze and air raid sirens sounding on the empty streets of Belgorod city.

Moscow accuses Kyiv of stepping up ‘terror attacks’ to disrupt presidential elections

Dmitry Azarov, governor of the Samara region 850km southeast of Moscow, said the Syzran refinery was on fire, but an attack on a second refinery had been thwarted.

Russia’s Defence Ministry said it had repelled attempts by Ukrainian forces to cross the border into Belgorod region.

Russia accuses Ukraine

Russia on Saturday accused Ukraine of stepping up “terrorist activities” during the presidential election to attract more aid and weapons from the West.

“It is obvious that the corrupt regime in Kyiv has intensified its terrorist activities in connection with the ongoing presidential elections in Russia in order to demonstrate its activity to its Western handlers and to beg for even more financial assistance and lethal weapons,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

It said a Ukrainian drone had dropped a shell on a voting station in a Russian-controlled part of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya region. There was no mention of any casualties from the incident, which Reuters could not independently verify.

Russian elections

The Kremlin is hoping for a high turnout to demonstrate that the country is united behind Putin, whose hold on power is not under threat.

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Aged 71 and in office as president or prime minister since the last day of 1999, he dominates Russia’s political landscape, and none of the other three candidates on the ballot paper presents any credible challenge.

His leading critics are in prison or have fled abroad, prompting the opposition to call the vote a sham. Russia’s best-known opposition politician, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic penal colony last month, and his supporters have accused Putin of having him killed.

The Kremlin denied that, and his death certificate said he died of natural causes.

Overall turnout had topped 40 per cent by the afternoon of day two. Some of the highest rates — approaching 70pc — were reported in the Belgorod region where the missile strike occurred and in Russian-controlled regions of Ukraine where Kyiv says voting is illegal and void.

‘Cyberattack’

Russia’s governing party, United Russia, said on Saturday that it was facing a widespread denial of service attack — a form of cyberattack aimed at paralysing web traffic — and had suspended non-essential services to repel it.

State news agency RIA quoted a senior telecoms official as saying the level of cyberattacks against Russia was “unprecedented”, and blaming it on Ukraine and Western countries. He said some of the activity had been traced to IP addresses in Western Europe and North America.

Published in Dawn, March 17th, 2024