By Saturday morning, Golos election monitoring group had already received reports of more than 1,000 suspected cases of electoral fraud from around the country. The campaign in Kostroma has seen one of the candidates, prominent opposition politician Ilya Yashin, briefly detained, while the party’s youth coordinator was beaten up.

“The elections comes as the Kremlin struggles to tackle an economic crisis even though Putin’s personal approval ratings still soar at 83 per cent”. “Today the problem is that there is no real competition”, political scientist Alexander Kynev told.

Regions will elect 21 governors from among 100 candidates representing 16 parties.

Among other things, the sanctions, imposed by the Commerce Department, make it more hard for USA companies to get export licenses for goods and materials destined to those individuals and entities.

“They’ve let the controllable opposition stand – the Communists, the Liberal Democratic Party (nationalists) – but not the liberal opposition”.

Candidates from Navalny’s opposition party, RPR-Parnas, were prevented from running in Novosibirsk in Siberia, Magadan in the far east and Kaluga, a manufacturing hub southwest of Moscow, after they failed to register enough signatures needed to participate.

Since its annexation by Russian Federation over a year ago, Crimea’s once bustling tourism industry has taken a major hit: Shops have closed, resort staffs have been cut, and the number of tourists declined to a fraction of what it used to be. The opposition has claimed it was not given equal access to state television or to billboards, and a party called “Parzas” was registered in Kostroma in an apparent attempt to siphon off votes from Parnas.

The Russian president eliminated all gubernatorial elections in 2014, citing the need for strong centralized rule in the face of possible terrorist attacks. “It counts on winning the elections through its domination of information and resources”.