It will be almost impossible for any serious rival to beat Putin, who has been in power for 24 years.
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Russia's national elections commission has registered the first two candidates who will compete with President Vladimir Putin in the March election – a vote that Putin is all but certain to win.
The commission approved Leonid Slutsky of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party and Vladislav Davankov of New People for the election, which will take place between March 15th-17th.
Neither candidate poses a significant challenge to Putin, who has dominated Russian politics since becoming president in 2000. Both their parliamentary parties have been largely supportive of legislation backed by Putin's power-base party, United Russia.
Slutsky, as head of the lower house of parliament's foreign affairs committee, has been a prominent backer of a Kremlin foreign policy. In the last presidential election in 2018, his party's candidate tallied less than 6% of the vote.
Davankov, meanwhile, is a deputy speaker in the lower house of parliament, the Duma. His party was established in 2020, and holds 15 seats in the 450-member chamber.
The Communist Party has put forth Nikolai Kharitonov as its candidate, but the elections commission has not formally registered him. Kharitonov was the party's candidate in 2004 - finishing a distant second to Putin.
Meanwhile, a politician calling for peace in Ukraine was rejected by the commission last month. Yekaterina Duntsova’s initial nomination by a group of supporters was rejected on the grounds that her paperwork contained errors, including spelling mistakes, and the Supreme Court ultimately rejected Duntsova’s appeal against the decision.
Putin himself is running as an independent. Under Russian law, independent candidates must be nominated by at least 500 supporters, and must also gather at least 300,000 signatures from 40 regions or more.