Putin Announces His Presidential Candidacy

Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced that he will run in the 2024 presidential election, participants in an awards ceremony at the Kremlin have said. Andrei Kolesnikov, a Kremlin pool correspondent for Kommersant, was the first to write about Putin agreeing to go to the polls. “A lieutenant colonel from the award ceremony, when all the awardees surrounded the president, asked Vladimir Putin to stand for election. The president agreed. The others then joined the request,” the journalist wrote. The request was made by the “speaker of the DNR parliament”, Lieutenant Colonel Artem Zhoga, who appealed on behalf of “all our people, all of Donbass, our reunited lands.” The Kremlin later published a video of Putin responding to Zhoga: “I will be honest, at different times I had different thoughts, but now you are right. Now is time to make a decision. I will run for the post of president of the Russian Federation.”