REGIONS…

In an important electoral rebuke to the Kremlin, quasi-incumbent Konstantin Titov won election as governor of Samara, an industrial region on the Volga. Titov had resigned the governorship in April after finishing a quixotic and ignominious presidential run that left him with less than one percent of the vote nationally and a third-place finish at home. But he engineered a quick special election to impede his opponents from settling on a single candidate. The head of the local branch of the Kremlin’s Unity movement came out against him (“I shall never forgive Titov for running against Putin,” he said), but the candidate he endorsed finished last, not far ahead of “none of the above.”