This ‘election’ won’t kickstart any change in Russia – but a defeat for Putin in Ukraine can | Timothy Garton Ash

The countless individual tributes to Alexei Navalny show there is another Russia, and it's one the west must support

By next Monday, Vladimir Putin will have been re-elected" president of Russia. In truth, Russian voters have no genuine choice this weekend, since Putin has killed his most formidable opponent, Alexei Navalny, and ordered the disqualification of any other candidate who presented even a small chance of genuine competition. This plebiscitary legitimating procedure - quite familiar from the history of other dictatorships - will also be implemented in some parts of eastern Ukraine, which Russian official sources describe as the New Territories. Large percentages for turnout and the vote for Putin must be expected, and will be no more accurate than his historical essays on Russo-Ukrainian relations.

Encouraged by signs of western weakness such as the refusal of the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, to send Taurus missiles to Ukraine and Pope Francis's recommendation for Ukraine to hoist the white flag, Russia's brutal dictator will continue to try to conquer more of Ukraine. Not only does Putin believe that Ukraine belongs historically to a Russia whose manifest destiny it is to be a great, imperial power. Unlike western governments, his regime is both politically and economically committed to continue this war, with as much as 40% of its budget devoted to military, intelligence, disinformation and internal security spending, and a war economy that can't easily be switched back to peacetime mode.