Putin claims second term
MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) -- Vladimir Putin has claimed victory in Russia's presidential elections, racking up nearly 70 percent of the vote in early returns from balloting in which he was considered a shoo-in for a second term.
With nearly 86 percent of the votes counted early Monday, Putin had swamped his six opponents, election officials said.
Three other candidates received 14 percent of the vote or less.
Putin pledged to focus on boosting the economy, reforming the military, raising standards of living and strengthening press freedoms.
"I want to assure you and I promise that, in the next four years, I will work just as hard, do everything in my power to have the entire government work just as intensively," Putin told reporters.
"I promise you that all the democratic achievements of our people will unconditionally be provided for and guaranteed."
More than half of Russia's 109 million voters turned out, validating the results.
Some observers had expressed concern that Putin's large lead in pre-election polls would lead some voters to skip the balloting.
Putin ran as an independent, although he has a loyal following in the United Russia party, which trounced the opposition in December's parliamentary elections.
Putin has made the fight against Chechen separatist guerrillas a priority of his first four years in office. In the process he earned repeated criticism from the West for human rights abuses in the impoverished Caucasus region.
He has also come under fire in the West for using Russia's state-dominated media to push his campaign, giving little room to rivals.
But despite the ongoing war in Chechnya, which has spurred a series of dramatic, deadly attacks in Moscow blamed on the separatists, Putin has remained widely popular.
Analyst Nikolay Petrov of the Carnegie Moscow Center said Putin has brought Russia a kind of "unstable stability" based on his popularity and on high oil prices.
His popularity has endured even though "almost all political or democratic institutions have weakened" during his first term, Petrov said.
"This election is very different from the previous one, due to the fact there was almost no real signs of any real campaign," he said.
One of his opponents, Ivan Rybkin, withdrew from the elections, calling the process a "farce."
Rybkin, the head of the Liberal Russia party, made headlines when he mysteriously disappeared for five days in February and offered no explanation for his whereabouts when he re-appeared.
He was running at one percent in pre-election polls when he dropped out.
In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said the Bush administration has expressed its concern to Putin and other Russian officials that Moscow continue its path toward democracy.
"But at the same time, I think it's an overstatement to think that Russia is going back to the days of the Soviet Union," Powell told ABC's This Week.
"They're not going back there. I think they have discovered what democracy is about. They like it, and they want to be able to vote for their leaders."
CNN Moscow Bureau Chief Jill Dougherty contributed to this report.
