Russia Presidential election 2018 — Results

The essentials

Vladimir Putin was re-elected to a fourth presidential term on 18 March 2018 with an official 76.69% of the vote — at the time the highest share of any post-Soviet Russian presidential election — on an official turnout of 67.50%. The date itself carried the message: polling day fell on the fourth anniversary of the annexation of Crimea. Pavel Grudinin, a strawberry-farm magnate running for the Communist Party in place of the party's veteran leader Gennady Zyuganov, finished a distant second with 11.77%; Vladimir Zhirinovsky of the LDPR took 5.65% in his sixth and final presidential run.

A managed field

The one challenger the Kremlin plainly feared never reached the ballot: Alexei Navalny, whose anti-corruption investigations had drawn nationwide protests in 2017, was barred over a fraud conviction that the European Court of Human Rights had ruled arbitrary. He called for a boycott, making turnout — not the result — the campaign's real contest, and state employers were widely reported to have pressured staff to vote. The remaining field was ornamental: television personality Ksenia Sobchak (1.68%) ran as an "against all" liberal option many suspected of being Kremlin-approved, followed by Yabloko founder Grigory Yavlinsky (1.05%), business ombudsman Boris Titov (0.76%), Maxim Suraykin of Communists of Russia (0.68%) and nationalist Sergey Baburin (0.65%).

How the day unfolded

The election was administered with a push for visible turnout — polling stations doubled as festivals, first-time voters got gifts, and mobile "at-home" voting expanded sharply. Golos, Russia's independent observation movement, catalogued ballot-box stuffing captured on official webcams, carousel voting and inflated turnout protocols in multiple regions; statistical analyses again found heavy clustering of results at round percentages. The OSCE concluded the election lacked genuine competition, while noting the count itself was orderly in most observed precincts. In Crimea, voting was held for the first time in a Russian presidential election — rejected as illegitimate by Ukraine, the EU and the United States.

Why it mattered

The 2018 mandate carried Putin past Leonid Brezhnev's tenure and set up the constitutional overhaul of 2020, which reset his term count to zero and opened the way to rule to 2036. The post-election period also brought the deeply unpopular pension-age rise, which cut Putin's approval sharply within months of his 76.69% triumph — a reminder of the gap between managed results and managed opinion.

Reading the numbers

Vote shares are the Central Election Commission's official percentages of all ballots cast, exactly as published, to two decimal places. Per-region results exist only in the CEC's Russian-language database, so no interactive regional map is shown for this election.

Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.