Russia's presidential election was unfair and clearly skewed in favour of prime minister Vladimir Putin, international vote monitors have said.
Election observers said Mr Putin, who official results show won about 64 per cent of the vote, was given a clear advantage over his rivals in the media and that state resources were used at a regional level to support his bid for a third presidential term.
"There was no real competition, and abuse of government resources ensured that the ultimate winner of the election was never in doubt," Tonino Picula, one of the vote monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE), said in a report.
" The point of elections is that the outcome should be uncertain. This was not the case in Russia ," he said."According to our assessment, these elections were unfair," he told reporters.
The observers, from a joint team from the OSCE and the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly, also called for alleged electoral violations in yesterday's election to be thoroughly investigated.
Monitors said they assessed voting on election day positively but that they viewed the vote count as negative at almost a third of polling stations observed.
The European Union said this afternoon it shared the concerns of international monitors over "shortcomings" in Russia's presidential election and called on Moscow to address them.
A spokeswoman for the EU high representative on foreign affairs and security policy, Catherine Ashton said the EU broadly agrees with reports by the Council of Europe and the OSCE that highlighted problems with Sunday's election.
Mr Putin faces new protests today to challenge his victory. His opponents, complaining of widespread fraud in yesterday's election, said they did not recognize the results and would rally near the Kremlin.
But the former KGB spy, who after four years as prime minister will be returning to the post he held from 2000 until 2008, said with tears rolling down his cheeks that he had won a "clean" victory.
Mr Putin addressed a vast crowd of supporters in central Moscow last night, tears streaming from his eyes and declaring victory not only for himself but also for the magnificence of Russia.
Exit polls indicated he was assured a commanding victory in the presidential election. It was a remarkable performance, beginning in humility but becoming more strident by the minute and hinting broadly at victory over outside forces and ending with a cry of “Glory to Russia!”
The crowd, perhaps in the region of 100,000, filled the large Manege Square on the north side of the Kremlin and stretched up the long slope into into the city’s more important thoroughfare, Tverskaya, formerly Gorky Street. They waved Russian tricolours and cheered loudly as president Dmitriy Medvedev introduced Mr Putin as the winner.
It was victory in an open and honest struggle, Mr Putin told them, not merely a vote for the presidency of Russia but a test of the country’s political maturity.
“We have shown that nobody can impose anything on us. Our people are truly capable of easily distinguishing the desire for novelty and renewal from political provocations which are aimed only at breaking the Russian state apart and usurping power,” he said. The people had shown that such plans did not work on on Russian soil, he added.
As results poured in from across the vast territory Mr Putin, with more than 63 per cent, was way ahead of his nearest rival the communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov.
He was on 17 per cent of the vote, with billionaire independent Mikhail Prokhorov and ultra nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky next on just over 7 per cent. Sergei Mironov of the left-of-centre “A Just Russia” was last with less than 4 per cent.
Mr Zyuganov said his party would not recognize the result and called the election "illegitimate, dishonest and not transparent". Liberal leader Vladimir Ryzhkov also said it was not legitimate.
Reports of irregularities abounded throughout the day with Yelena Bychkova of the League of Voters saying the most widespread violations were associated with the misuse of absentee ballots and with the phenomenon known here as “carousel voting” in which groups of people travel around by bus and use absentee papers to vote several times at different stations.
One Irish observer, Eoghan Murphy TD (FG Dublin South East) who was in Moscow as an observer for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), said he noted an unusually high proportion of absentee voting certificates cast in the stations that he visited.
He also saw large numbers of uniformed military voting in groups of up to 100 at a time.
Valentin Gorbunov, head of the Moscow City electoral commission, denied there were any attempts at fraud in the city. “It’s all talk; it’s all being paid for.”
But opposition spokesmen and organisations were adamant that falsification was rife.
Undoubtedly, the most bizarre event of the day took place at station 2079 in the Academy of Sciences where Mr Putin voted. About 20 minutes after his departure the station was invaded by members of the Ukrainian feminist group Femen who, with breasts bared, tried to steal the box in which he had cast his ballot.
Three women: Anna Dyeda, Oksana Shachko and Irina Fomina, all of them Ukrainian citizens, where arrested and taken to the Gagarin Police station nearby.
In the heated atmosphere of polling day it was difficult to judge how authentic the claims of falsification were and a much clearer picture is likely to emerge today when the OSCE issues its official report on its observation missions from the parliamentary assembly and the Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR).
There was talk in Moscow last night, however, that these two branches of the same organisation may differ in their accounts of the election with the parliamentarians taking a more outspoken approach than ODIHR which usually couches its views in diplomatic language.
Additional reporting: Reuters