Russian leader Vladimir Putin Sunday reclaimed the Kremlin in a crushing presidential election victory that he declared was honest but the opposition said was undermined by serial violations.

Putin was on course for a first round election knockout with over 60 percent of the vote, initial results showed, with his main rival the Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov in a distant second.

Russians started voting Sunday in presidential polls likely to return strongman Vladimir Putin to the Kremlin for a record third term amid protests unseen since the Soviet era.

Voters in the far east of the world's largest country began casting their ballots at 2000 GMT in a marathon election straddling nine time zones which will close in the western exclave of Kaliningrad 21 hours later at 1700 GMT.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin stopped short of backing Bashar Assad in the Syrian crisis, saying Russia had no special relationship with his regime and refusing to predict that the president would stay in power.

With pressure mounting on Moscow to harden its line against Assad, Putin called on both the Damascus regime and opposition rebels to agree a ceasefire but also criticized the West for backing the rebels in the conflict.

Vladimir Putin on Wednesday accused the Russian opposition of preparing dirty tricks to discredit this weekend's presidential poll, saying they would have to respect the view of the majority in the vote.

Putin attacked Russia's nascent protest movement with characteristic venom in a display of confidence ahead of Sunday's poll which he is expected to win to claim a third term in the Kremlin after his stint as premier.

A bare-chested Vladimir Putin strokes the bottom of an Olympic gymnast and overdoses on Botox as his wife Lyudmila takes refuge in a monastery -- in a new staging of a play at a Moscow theater.

The play -- staged ahead of March 4 polls where Putin is expected to win back the presidency -- takes plenty of inspiration from Internet gossip and breaks almost every remaining taboo about the Russian leader's personal life.

The four candidates that are challenging Vladimir Putin in the March 4 presidential elections include the Communist Party boss, a billionaire, a bearded populist and an ultra-nationalist.

As Russia edges toward Sunday's polls that will determine its leader for the next six years, the swelling protest movement has not rallied around a single candidate to oppose Putin's re-installment in the Kremlin.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Tuesday he was unafraid for his life and had grown used to plots to kill him, after state television reported a new conspiracy days before Russia's presidential poll.

"You cannot live with constant fear -- let them fear us. I have been living with this since 1999," when Putin first became prime minister before heading the Kremlin in 2000-2008, Russian news agencies quoted him as saying.

Russia's new Internet-savvy opposition is going online to protest and monitor the presidential elections on March 4, bringing its iPhones and Twitter into the fray against Vladimir Putin.

As jokes and spoof videos about Putin, expected to win back the presidency in Sunday's polls, spread like wildfire on social networking sites and YouTube, opposition activists are using the Internet to promote their cause.

Russia's secret service has arrested two men in connection with a plot to assassinate Prime Minister Vladimir Putin after the March 4 presidential elections, Channel One state television said Monday.

The station showed two men who said they were acting on the orders of Chechen warlord Doku Umarov. They said they prepared the attack in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa and were planning to carry it out in Moscow.

Thousands of Russians linked hands Sunday around Moscow in a symbolic protest against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's expected return to the Kremlin for a third term in elections next weekend.

A din of endless honking descended on Moscow's 16-kilometer (10-mile) Garden Ring Road as drivers expressed support to large crowds of smiling and waving people who gathered in freezing weather under a heavy gray sky.