Vladimir Putin: As he runs for Russian president in 2024 election, is he the longest-serving Kremlin leader?

Vladimir Putin has moved to run for president in the March 2024 election which would be a step closer to a fifth term in office. Putin announced the news on Friday but there is little question on what the outcome will be. He already is the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Josef Stalin.

Putin, 71, has firmly grasped Russia's political and media system for over two decades and still commands wide support, despite starting an immensely costly war in Ukraine that has taken thousands of his countrymen’s lives, provoked repeated attacks inside Russia – including one on the Kremlin itself – and corroded its aura of invincibility.

Putin has won previous elections by a landslide, but independent election watchdogs say they were tainted by widespread fraud, as he is accused of jailing prominent opposition politicians, such as Alexei Navalny and Ilya Yashi.

Putin announced his decision to run in the 17 March presidential election after a Kremlin award ceremony, when war veterans and others pleaded with him to seek re-election.

“I won’t hide it from you — I had various thoughts about it over time, but now, you’re right, it’s necessary to make a decision,” Mr Putin said in a video released by the Kremlin after the event. “I will run for president of the Russian Federation.”

Tatiana Stanovaya of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre noted the announcement was made in a low-key way instead of a live televised speech. “It’s not about prosperity, it’s about survival,” Ms Stanovaya observed. "The stakes have been raised to the maximum.”

About 80% of the populace approves of his performance, according to the independent pollster Levada Centre, but the support might come from the heart or it might reflect submission to a leader whose crackdown on any opposition has made even relatively mild criticism perilous.

In 2008, when he stepped aside to become prime minister due to term limits but remained Russia’s driving force, presidential terms were extended to six years from four. Another package of amendments he pushed through three years ago reset the count for two consecutive terms to begin in 2024. But around this time, Putin’s concern about losing power may have been elevated as Levada polling showed his approval rating significantly lower, hovering around 60%.

Brookings Institution scholar Fiona Hill, a former US National Security Council expert on Russian affairs, agrees that Mr Putin thought “a lovely small, small victorious war” would consolidate support for his re-election. “Ukraine would capitulate,” she told AP this year. “He’d install a new president in Ukraine. He would declare himself the president of a new union of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia over the course of the time leading up to the 2024 election. He’d be the supreme leader.”

For the first time, voting in the presidential election will take place over three days from 15-17 March 2024, including in four regions of Ukraine partially and illegally annexed by Russia.

The election commission argued that the practice of multi-day voting, used in other elections since the Covid-19 pandemic, is more convenient for voters.

Putin became acting president on New Year’s Eve in 1999 when Boris Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned. He was elected to his first term in March 2000. Photos from 2022 of him with a bloated face and a hunched posture led to speculation he was seriously ill, but he seems little changed in recent public appearances.

“He’s a wartime president, is mobilising the population behind him,” Ms Hill said. “And that will be the message around the 2024 election, depending on where things are in the battlefield.”