MOSCOW - Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday defended as legitimate the landslide victory of his party in an election criticised in Europe and denounced by international observers as unfair.
Putin, for whom Sunday's vote provided a mandate to continue shaping Russian politics after he steps down early next year, dismissed allegations of cheating when he met a group of workers outside Moscow.
Hailing United Russia's victory as a "legitimate" vote of public trust, he said: "It is now clear to me that Russians will never allow their country to develop along the destructive path seen in some other countries of the former Soviet Union."
Putin, who portrayed himself as a guarantor of stability in Russia during the campaign, was referring to past elections which set ex-Soviet neighbours, Ukraine and Georgia, on a pro-Western path after huge street protests.
The Central Election Commission said that with almost all votes counted, United Russia had won 64.1 percent of votes, nearly six times as many as the nearest challenger, the Communist party. Two smaller pro-Kremlin groupings took another 16 percent of the vote and pro-Western parties won no seats.
Russian officials were jubilant. "This is the result we were promised last Friday," laughed one government figure.
But allegations of vote-rigging and fraud alarmed the European Union, which said free speech had been violated in the run-up to the vote, and the United States, which urged Moscow to investigate the allegations.
The German government said the results were "neither free, fair nor democratic". Britain said the fact that most Western monitors had been prevented from observing the vote was "deeply disappointing".
The concerns of foul play could drive a new wedge between an increasingly assertive Moscow and the West. The atmosphere was sharpened on the eve of the election when Putin accused foreign governments of "poking their snotty noses" into Russia's affairs.
Opposition parties and international monitors said one-sided press coverage in the campaign, heavy use of government resources to campaign for pro-Kremlin parties, and numerous irregularities during voting had skewed the outcome.
The Communists, the liberal Union of Right Forces and opposition icon Garry Kasparov have all described the election, in separate comments, as the "dirtiest in Russian history".
Observers from the Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) described the election as "not fair" in a statement, saying it "failed to meet many ... commitments and standards for democratic elections".
