1849 GMT: Putin's share of the vote is rising, according to the latest official count, which gives him 63%.
1847 GMT: Back in Moscow, the lavishly-staged concert to celebrate Putin's apparent victory has begun, says AFPTV's Paul Gypteau, though there is so far no sign of the man himself.
Over 100,000 participants are braving temperatures of minus 4 Celsius to be there.
"We are for Putin. We are for stability," one of the participants, engineer Aleksandr Sokolov, told AFP.
But some participants said that they had been ordered to attend the rally.
"We don't support him. We've been forced to come here by our managers. We have a job, we have families, we can't afford to lose them," one man told AFP on condition of anonymity.
1845 GMT: More on the polling station attack: "Unknown armed men, their faces masked, attacked a polling station an hour after closing," first deputy interior minister Alexander Gorokhovoi is quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying.
One attacker was also killed in the shootout with police.
1843 GMT: Three police have been killed in an attack on a polling station in Dagestan -- an unstable Caucasus region neighbouring Chechnya -- the Interfax news agency quoted an Interior Ministry spokesman as saying.
Dagestan, a Muslim Caspian Sea region known for its ancient culture and tapestry of ethnic groups, is fighting an insurgency by militants seeking to establish an Islamic state across the Russian Caucasus.
1841 GMT: Election commission head Vladimir Churov has denied reports of irregularities like those we've listed below, saying organisers are "working perfectly".
1840 GMT: Russian phrase of the day: "carousel voting". This is organised repeat voting in which people are said to use absentee ballots to vote several times at polling stations run by corrupt officials.
A website set up by protest leader Alexei Navalny, Rosvybory, aired an interview with a woman named Kristina, who said she cast her vote twice for a payment of 5,000 rubles ($171).
Hundreds of buses were parked on Moscow's central Bolotnaya Square on Sunday packed with young people from provincial towns who said they had voted for Putin, an AFP correspondent reported.
"I came here to vote for Vladimir Vladimirovich (Putin)," said a young man from Belomorsk in the Far North, without giving his name or saying why he had travelled over 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) to vote.
1835 GMT: Reports of irregularities appear to be building; the Control2012 website -- an umbrella website for the record number of election observers -- is listing more than 5,000 violations.
Tycoon candidate Mikhail Prokhorov tweeted that his supporters acting as observers had recorded more than 4,000 violations.
Videos of alleged fraud were meanwhile springing up online -- the Gazeta.ru website posted a video from a polling station web cam in Dagestan in the North Caucasus, showing several men feeding a constant stream of ballot papers into electronic ballot boxes.
1820 GMT: Billionaire candidate Mikhail Prokhorov, who secured about 7.47% of votes according to the preliminary results, has called the conduct of the election "dishonest" -- joining the Communists and liberals in condemning the poll.
"But I accepted this challenge and I ran for president," he told Russian television.
Prokhorov added he now plans to create "a political party that will fight for power".
Earlier TV reports had said journalists were offered champagne and sushi at Prokhorov's ultramodern headquarters, where floor-to-ceiling windows displayed views of the capital, on Sunday evening.
1810 GMT: The pro-Putin crowd in the Russian capital has swelled to 110,000 people, police are saying.
"I voted for Putin because I trust him" and "Putin is the perfect president" are among the slogans chanted by the crowd, AFP reporters say.
1805 GMT: Members of the huge crowd of Putin fans are waving flags and swaying as music plays. A stage had been set up in advance in the central Moscow square.
For a show of manpower from Putin's opponents, observers will have to wait until tomorrow, when leaders of the recent protests have said they will demonstrate in Pushkin Square for "Russia without Putin". They expect a turnout of at least 30,000.
That rally has been sanctioned by the authorities but police -- who have brought in 6,300 extra officers from across Russia -- have warned they will break up any unauthorised gatherings.
1800 GMT: More than 100,000 Putin supporters have gathered in central Moscow on Manezh Square near the Kremlin, according to TV reports.
The crowd was chanting "We are for Putin!" following the announcement of his apparent landslide victory.
Nashi (Ours), the pro-Kremlin youth group, plans a rock-concert-style mass rally there tonight.
1748 GMT: Liberal politician and opposition protest movement leader Vladimir Ryzhkov says the presidential election "cannot be considered legitimate in any way."
1742 GMT: In stark contrast to Govorukhin's view, the polls are described as "crooked" and "absolutely unfair" by Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov.
1737 GMT: In his first reaction to the vote, director of Putin's electoral campaign Stanislav Govorukhin describes the elections as "the most honest in the whole of Russia's history", according to AFPTV's Paul Gypteau.
1730 GMT: Putin is on course to win Russia's presidential elections in the first round in a landslide victory over his four rivals, an exit poll survey by the state-run VTsIOM polling institute and initial results suggest.
Putin will win 58.3% of the vote, the exit poll is projecting, while early results based on 14.5% of Russia's polling stations say he has won 61.8% of the vote, the central election commission says.
The early results -- gathered mainly from the Far East and Siberia where polls closed several hours ago -- showed Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov trailing in second with 17.8%.
The firebrand nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky was scoring 8.0%, tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov 7.6%, while the left-leaning former upper house speaker Sergei Mironov was fifth with 3.7%, the early results showed.
VTsIOM projects Zyuganov to come second with 17.7%, while Prokhorov was to finish third with 9.2%.
Zhirinovsky is on course to finish fourth with 8.5%, while Mironov was likely to finish last with 4.8%, the pollster said.
VTsIOM, whose exit polls are commissioned by Russian state television and which has developed a reputation of closely predicting final results, said 31.7% of the respondents refused to answer their survey.
1720 GMT: "Very early tomorrow morning, we will be able to unveil the first preliminary results with 99% of the votes counted," says electoral commission chief Churov.
1715 GMT: "There won't be a second round. We're counting on victory in the first round," says Stanislav Govorukhin, director of Putin's electoral campaign.
1712 GMT: With 14.5% of polling station results in, Putin is winning the election with 61.80% of the vote, according to the head of the electoral commission Vladimir Churov.
1707 GMT: Vladimir Putin is set to win the presidential poll with over 58% of the vote, according to an exit poll, my AFP colleagues report from Moscow.
1704 GMT: The last polling station for this election has closed in the Western Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, a port on the Baltic Sea.
1655 GMT: The webcams installed by the Russian authorities in tens of thousands of polling stations across the country in a bid to counter allegations of fraud are performing inconsistently, according to checks made by AFP correspondents.
The images are blocked regularly, the ballot boxes are aren't visible and the connection on the official site is less than perfect, my colleague Maria Panina reports.
1645 GMT: Allegations of fraud in the vote are increasing, my colleague Maria Panina reports from the Russian capital.
In Moscow, the opposition Yabloko party have denounced "widespread fraud", claiming people have voted in two different polling stations while bundles of ballots have been stuffed into ballot boxes in Bryansk, Tambov, Nizhny Novgorod and Novosibirsk.
1632 GMT: More than 50 percent of the electorate have voted across Russia according to the election commission, less than an hour before the final ballot box is closed, having flocked to polling stations from the early hours of this morning.
"I had to queue for a long time here - but it's great! I hate it when the people don't come along to vote and complain afterwards that we've chosen for them," said 40-year-old Moscow engineer Igor Kolossov after having slipped his voting papers into the ballot box.
1620 GMT: My colleague Maria Panina in the Russian capital says dozens of lorries full of policemen have been deployed in the centre of Moscow, near to the famed Bolshoi Theatre.
"There are so many police in the centre that it looks like the people are going to depose the president, rather than elect him," comments blogger Andrey Kozenko.
1610 GMT: In a bid to counter the allegations of vote-rigging that tarred December's parliamentary elections, Russian authorities have installed web cameras in 95,000 polling stations across the country to ensure transparency.
My colleague Maria Antonova reports from Moscow that the webcams are doing a good job in keeping Russia amused with quirky scenes but failed to erase suspicions about the process.
Disco dancing, children fighting and lovers kissing were among the sights glimpsed by Russians watching the live relays of the election process from the pair of webcams installed in each of the polling stations.
WELCOME TO AFP'S LIVE TEXT COVERAGE OF THE RUSSIAN presidential election, in which current prime minister Vladimir Putin is expected to win a third term after the final polling station in the world's largest country closes at 1700 GMT.
Putin was president for two consecutive four-year terms between 2000 and 2008 before stepping aside for his protege Dmitry Medvedev to take over. He has been prime minister since 2008.
Voters from Vladivostok on the Pacific to the Western exclave of Kaliningrad, a port wedged between Poland and the Baltic Sea, have been casting their ballots in a marathon election stretched over 21 hours in which victory for 59-year-old ex-KGB spy Putin appears inevitable.
Moscow police have drafted thousands of extra officers into the capital for the vote that is also being monitored by tens of thousands of independent observers on the lookout for signs of vote-rigging.
Despite recent anti-government demonstrations, state pollsters have forecast a first-round win for Putin with 60 percent of the vote, leaving his Communist rival Gennady Zyuganov trailing in second place with 15 percent.
Tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov and the flamboyant populist Vladimir Zhirinovsky are expected to battle for third place while the former upper house speaker Sergei Mironov is tipped to finish last, but there are no candidates representing the fledgling protest movement.
The main suspense does not surround the final result but whether Putin can win easily in the first round against his four rivals and if allegations of vote-rigging will spark a succession of protests to seriously challenge him.
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