Polling stations opened in Russia's westernmost exclave of Kaliningrad, which joined other Russian regions on Sunday to elect a president for the fifth time in the nation’s post-Soviet history.
Voting in the Kaliningrad region started at 09:00 Moscow time (05:00 GMT), an hour after polling stations opened in Moscow, St. Petersburg and another 50 regions in the European part of Russia and nine hours after polls opened in Chukotka, Kolyma and the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia's Far East.
Five candidates - Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, nationalist Liberal Democratic Party head Vladimir Zhirinovsky, A Just Russia Party leader Sergei Mironov and the only independent, billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov – are competing for the Russian presidency in the March 4 vote.
Some 110 million Russian citizens, including 2 million expatriates around the world, are eligible to vote in the presidential election whose winner will serve a six-year term, and not four years as previously.
Putin, who was Russia's president from 2000 to 2008 and has been prime minister since then, has led the race but may be forced into a second round if he gets less than 50 percent of the vote in the first.
The winner in the first round will be inaugurated as president in early May and President Dmitry Medvedev, a junior member of the ruling tandem with Putin, will step down.
