VLADIMIR Putin's predetermined landslide re-election will allow him to "throw off the shackles" and get "ready to march westwards".
Russia experts warned The Sun that Putin is a ruler who embodies the bloodthirstiness of both Stalin and Hitler with an "extra sprinkling of evil" - and now his foot is on the accelerator towards World War 3.
Last night, Putin, 71, cruised to an easy victory as he was re-elected with a record of over 87 per cent of the vote after facing token "nobody" candidates and suppressing opposition voters.
After nearly a quarter of century of his iron-fist rule, anyone capable of challenging him has been locked in a gulag, exiled or killed amid the harshest crackdown on opposition in Russia since Soviet times.
The predictable outcome means Putin is set to embark on a new six-year term that will see him overtake Josef Stalin and become Russia's longest-serving leader for more than 200 years if he survives it.
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Millions of eager eyes in Russia - and around the world - will now turn to glory-mad Putin's plan for his next term and his immediate goal to seize victory in Ukraine.
But Russia watchers fear that if Moscow does achieve success in Ukraine, bloodshed could spill into Europe.
In the wake of Putin's heavily-gloated success, Colonel Hamish de-Bretton Gordon said: "The world has woken up a more dangerous place this morning".
He told The Sun: "There are no shackles on Putin now."
However pitifully rigged or inaccurate the election results were, the ex-army officer argued: "It will allow Putin and his team to keep going on their path … to crack on with the accelerator right down."
Last night, UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps accused the former KGB lieutenant, who first shot to power in 1999, of behaving like “a modern-day Stalin” and "stealing" the election.
Writing in The Telegraph, the politician denounced Putin for having his opponents such as opposition leader Alexei Navalny “imprisoned or murdered” before the vote began.
De-Bretton Gordon said: "Grant Shapps is right - we need to wake up to this.
"Putin is Hitler and Stalin is all rolled into one with a bit more evil sprinkled around and people need to realise that.
"Putin is turning the Russian economy into a war economy, ramping it all up - these are all actions of someone who wants to keep attacking the West and not try for peace."
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He added: "There is no other leader in the world except for [Syrian dictator Bashar al] Assad who can claim 87 per cent of votes in a election."
In his triumphant victory speech last night, a puffed up Putin pledged to "defeat" his foes while a crowd of his lap dogs cheered him on.
In his venom-filled tirade, he threatened to spark World War 3 if Western boots were to hit the ground in Ukraine.
But summoning a patriotic sense of Russian unity, Putin said: "We are all one team. No one can suppress us, they will never succeed. But we, as one united family, can defeat them.
"And all our goals will be achieved, we will do everything to achieve this."
In terms of these unspecified "goals", de-Bretton Gordon argued: "His goal is to replicate Peter the Great who conquered Europe and to recover the old Soviet Union - starting with the Baltics."
The expert added: "Ukraine is the start of his march westwards.
Keir Giles, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House, also agreed with Shapps' assessment that Putin was striving to imitate his ruthless Soviet predecessor.
"Putin would like to be Stalin and he is on track. Totalitarianism and repression at home and abroad - these are the hallmarks of Stalin's regime.
"The worst atrocities carried out by Stalin’s forces on captured and occupied nations are being replicated in Ukraine's Russian-occupied territories."
The highly orchestrated polling was also illegally held in annexed Ukrainian regions Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson - despite Russian forces not fully controlling them.
British Foreign Secretary David Cameron blasted the results today, stating: "These Russian elections starkly underline the depth of repression under President Putin's regime, which seeks to silence any opposition to his illegal war."
However, Giles also said the truly important events of the last few days are not the election results, but the cracks that are showing in Putin's rule.
This is all about Putin fighting that great patriotic war
Oleksandr Danylyuk, ex-Ukrainian politician
If you look beyond the alleged ballot and voter turnout numbers, "everything else revealed things are not going Putin's way," he argued.
"The brave protests at individual polling stations showed people still willing to make their voice heard against Putin despite increasing repression".
A wave of attacks last week saw petrol bombs thrown at voting booths and ink poured into ballot boxes inspired fury in the Kremlin who vowed to put the "traitorous, scumbag" saboteurs into jail.
On Sunday, thousands protested at noon on Sunday against Putin at polling stations inside Russia and abroad inspired by Navalny, who died in an Arctic hellhole prison last month.
Giles added: "In his speech he referred to major challenges and said Navalny’s name for the first time which was him noting that support for Navalny is at a level he should be concerned about."
And his brief mention of Russia's need to defend itself against Ukraine's recent attacks on the motherland cuts through Moscow's lies about the war, Giles said.
"It shows Russia is not capable of defending itself against Ukraine."
Oleksandr V Danylyuk, a former chief military adviser to Ukraine, told The Sun that it's important that we listen closely to Putin's puffed up "victory speech".
Instead, he said: "This is all about Putin fighting that great patriotic war with the sense of all Russians united around him.
"This war from day one was mostly about throwing himself into his role as leader to show there was no one who can ever replace him."
He slammed the fact there was no "real difference" between this election and Soviet-era elections that he remembers from his youth.
"The nature of that so-called election has nothing in common with democracy.
"The other guys were selected because they were nobodies and had no agenda with a pro-Putin stance."
His landslide win, coupled with the past few weeks of nuclear sabre-rattling, is all intended to "send a strong message to the West," Danylyuk argued.
In a lengthy tirade just two weeks before his all but certain re-election, the ageing Russian ruler warned the West is in danger of being nuked.
A sniffling Putin accused the West of trying to "destroy" Russia as he vowed to fulfil Moscow's goals in Ukraine - and stated that
He insisted that western Russia must be "properly protected" after Nato welcomed Sweden and Finland into the military alliance.
And the despot pedalled his usual unfounded claim that Nato forces are "preparing to strike out territory" and that the West was in "danger of nuclear conflict" if they sent troops to Ukraine.
On Sunday, a top Nato ally warned that Brits should be conscripted into the military to deter Putin amid spiralling fears of World War 3.
Latvian foreign minister Krisjanis Karins called for Nato countries to adopt a "total defence" military model used by Latvia, a state that re-introduced conscription following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
This plan would see the UK have a large number of citizen-soldiers who could be called up to fight at a moment's notice.
