Russians go to the polls in a sham election for their president

AT THE END of this week millions of Russians will take part in the re-election of President Vladimir Putin, the country’s longest-serving dictator since Stalin. In a land where opposition politicians are dead, in prison or in exile, where speaking truth to power is a criminal offence and where a paranoid autocrat is happy to kill hundreds of thousands of his own people and his neighbours in order to assert and maintain his power, an election seems entirely unnecessary, a strange charade or a quaint anachronism.