Originally published 2021-04-11.
On 5 April 2021 Vladimir Putin signed a law that lets him seek two more six-year terms as president of Russia. If he won both, he could stay in the Kremlin until 2036, when he would be 83. The law did not hand him those years automatically. It removed a legal barrier, and each extra term still has to be won at the ballot box.
The signing was the final step of a process that began more than a year earlier with a package of constitutional amendments. Here is what the law actually says, how it came about, why supporters and critics read it so differently, and what has happened since.
What the April 2021 law changed
Before 2020, Russia's constitution limited a president to two consecutive terms. Putin had already served four terms in total: 2000 to 2004, 2004 to 2008, and then, after a break, 2012 to 2018 and 2018 to 2024. Under the old rules he would have had to step aside when his term ran out in 2024.
The new legislation brought Russia's election law into line with the amended constitution. Its key effect is often called the "zeroing" of Putin's terms: the presidential terms he served before the amendments took effect simply no longer count. That reset applies to him and, in principle, to former president Dmitry Medvedev. Anyone else elected in future faces a stricter limit of two terms in a lifetime, not just two in a row.
The final text was published on Russia's official legal information portal on the day Putin signed it, a Monday. At the time he had not said whether he would run in 2024. He had argued earlier that removing the question was useful because otherwise officials would spend their time, in his words, "darting their eyes in search for possible successors" instead of working.
How the 2020 constitutional vote set it up
The term reset was one part of a much larger rewrite of the constitution that Putin proposed in January 2020. The State Duma passed the package in March 2020 without any votes against it, and the amendments were put to a nationwide vote that ran for a week and ended on 1 July 2020.
Official results showed nearly 78 percent in favour, with turnout of about 68 percent. Opposition groups and independent monitors reported pressure on state employees to vote, weak oversight and other irregularities, and said the process lacked transparency. The amendments took effect on 4 July 2020.
Alongside the term reset, the package wrote several other ideas into the constitution:
- marriage defined as a union of one man and one woman;
- the Russian constitution placed above international law and rulings;
- a reference to God as part of the nation's heritage;
- a ban on giving away Russian territory;
- guarantees that the minimum wage cannot fall below the subsistence level and that pensions are indexed every year.
Bundling popular social guarantees with the term reset meant voters could not approve one without the other. The Council of Europe's legal advisory body, the Venice Commission, later concluded that the changes concentrated too much power in the presidency, weakened checks and balances, and were adopted too quickly for reforms of that size. It also noted that exempting two individuals from a term limit runs against the whole logic of having one.
Eligibility is not the same as a guaranteed tenure
Headlines in 2021 often said the law "allows Putin to rule until 2036". That is a fair shorthand, but it is worth being precise. The law made him eligible to stand in 2024 and again in 2030. It did not cancel elections or extend his existing term.
In practice, critics point out, Russian elections under Putin have offered limited real competition. Prominent opponents have been barred from the ballot, independent media have been squeezed, and observers have repeatedly documented problems with vote counting. So while the legal distinction between eligibility and appointment is real, many analysts treated the outcome of future elections as close to settled.
Two decades at the top
Putin first became acting president on the last day of 1999, when Boris Yeltsin resigned, and won his first election in March 2000. When he reached the two-term limit in 2008, he swapped roles with his ally Dmitry Medvedev, who became president while Putin served as prime minister. During Medvedev's term the presidential term was lengthened from four to six years, and Putin returned to the presidency in 2012.
By 2021 he had held power, as president or prime minister, for longer than any Kremlin leader since Joseph Stalin, who dominated the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. Two more full terms would take Putin past Stalin's roughly three decades in charge.
Why supporters and critics see him so differently
Much of Putin's early popularity came from the contrast with the 1990s. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russians lived through hyperinflation, unpaid wages, a debt default in 1998 and a sharp fall in life expectancy, especially among men. Many credited Putin with restoring order, bringing the most powerful oligarchs to heel and making Russia feel respected abroad again. Rising oil prices in the 2000s helped deliver real gains in living standards, which reinforced that image.
His critics describe a very different record: a system in which elections are managed, courts and media answer to the Kremlin, and wealth flows to a narrow circle close to the president. Opposition figures have been imprisoned, and several have been killed in circumstances the authorities deny any part in. The Kremlin rejects claims of authoritarian rule and electoral fraud.
Opposition politician Yevgeny Roizman, a former mayor of Yekaterinburg, reacted on Twitter with sarcasm. He wrote that Putin's backers "really think that if they managed to deceive human laws, then they will be able to deceive the laws of nature."
The Navalny case in spring 2021
The law was signed while the country's best-known opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, was in prison. Navalny had collapsed on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow on 20 August 2020. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, and he was later flown to the Charité hospital in Berlin. In early September the German government said tests showed he had been poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent. Russia denied any involvement.
Navalny flew back to Moscow on 17 January 2021 and was detained at the airport. Two days later his Anti-Corruption Foundation released a long video about a lavish estate on the Black Sea coast near Gelendzhik, which it alleged was built for Putin. The film passed 92 million views on YouTube within a week. The Kremlin denied the palace belonged to the president.
In February 2021 a court replaced Navalny's earlier suspended sentence with more than two and a half years in prison, and he was sent to a penal colony in the Vladimir region east of Moscow. By the time the term-limit law was signed, his lawyers and allies were warning publicly that his health was deteriorating and that he was being denied proper medical care. Those reports could not be independently checked at the time, and the prison service rejected them.
What happened next
Navalny's sentences grew longer. He received nine more years in 2022 and a further 19 years on extremism charges in August 2023. In December 2023 he was moved to a remote colony above the Arctic Circle, in the Yamalo-Nenets region. Russian prison authorities said he died there on 16 February 2024, at the age of 47.
Putin did use the new rules. He ran in the March 2024 presidential election, which was officially won with a record share of the vote amid wide criticism from Western governments and independent observers, and he was sworn in for a fifth term on 7 May 2024. That term runs to 2030. Under the 2021 law, he could stand once more, for a term ending in 2036.
For readers trying to follow Russian politics, the key point is simple: the 2021 law did not make anyone president for life, but it removed the last formal obstacle to Putin staying in office for as long as he can keep winning elections run under his own system.
Sources: Al Jazeera: Putin signs law allowing him two more terms as Russia's leader (5 April 2021); Wikipedia: 2020 amendments to the Constitution of Russia; Wikipedia: Alexei Navalny; PBS NewsHour: Russia says imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died (16 February 2024); Al Jazeera: Putin sworn in as president for record fifth term (7 May 2024). Story first spotted via UNILAD.
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