Abkhazia’s Central Election Commission declared the validity of the breakaway region’s presidential elections held on December 12 with a voter turnout of 73 percent. Sergei Bagapsh, the incumbent and long-standing Moscow protégé, won the elections in the first round with nearly 60 percent of the votes, thus defeating his main rival – former vice-president Raul Khajimba – who received slightly more than 15 percent of the votes. The other three competitors, the head of the state-owned Abkhaz Shipping Company Zaur Ardzinba, the businessman Beslan Butba, and university professor Vitaly Bganba, garnered 10, 8 and 1 percent respectively.

All five candidates pledged their allegiance to Moscow’s policy and did not voice any intention of confronting the status quo established after the 2008 Russian-Georgian war in the region. Moscow nevertheless from the very beginning of the election campaign opted for Bagapsh, an already tested Moscow-ally, in order to eschew even minor risks of instability.

The most prominent Western actors in the region, the EU and the U.S., termed the elections illegitimate. The EU issued a special declaration declaring that it does not recognize the "constitutional and legal framework within which these elections have taken place". Likewise, the U.S. recognized "neither the legality nor the results" of the elections.

Tbilisi termed the elections a "farce" of the "proxy regime", arguing that the Kremlin has revoked even weak autonomous features on part of the separatist regime, having placed the region under complete occupation since 2008.

However, certain analysts, such as Paul Goble and Sergey Markedonov, hailed the new "democratic" trends emerging in the wake of "fair" and "free" elections. Those analysts pointed to the low margins by which Bagapsh won the race and that, considering the much higher margins of victory usually enjoyed by Russian and Central Asian leaders, the Abkhazian elections can be viewed as an aspiration on Bagapsh's part to build a democratic regime, which would be difficult to challenge by Georgia and the West, while it could also create problems for Moscow.

In contestation of this view, one can compare the last election with that conducted in Abkhazia in 2004, when the race between the same top candidates was much closer than in the current case. According to the official results released on October 5, 2004, Bagapsh received 45.7 percent and Raul Khajimba 38.4 percent of votes.

Moreover, the International Crisis Group estimated on the basis of the January 2005 Abkhazian electoral roll that in 2006, 129,127 individuals reached the voting age out of a total population ranging from 157,000 to 190,000. Against this figure, the Abkhaz interior ministry's passport and visa service reported that 146,121 residents of breakaway Abkhazia (constituting 90 percent of the Abkhazian population) had obtained Abkhazian passports by December 7, 2009, just before the presidential elections. This would imply that the population of voting age in Abkhazia has increased by more than 16,000 individuals since 2005.

However, the incorrectness of these figures is not the only reason to question the fairness of the Abkhazian elections. Most importantly, the over 200,000 ethnic Georgians exiled from Abkhazia remain unable to participate in the elections. In addition, the exclusion of the 45,000 Georgians living in the Gali district of Abkhazia under severe conditions from the elections undermine the principle of free and fair elections in essence.

According to Georgian media, the human rights abuses against ethnic Georgians have increased in the Gali district lately. Russian troops reportedly detained ten minibuses and later opened fire on the population of the Nabakevi village on December 19th. The following day, eleven Georgian families were robbed in their homes in the village of Chuburkhinji, Gali district, according to Georgian sources.

Russian troops enjoy a ten-year agreement on joint border protection, granting Russia the right to patrol Abkhaz land and maritime borders and reducing the Abkhaz presence at the breakaway region's checkpoints.

This fact, which the Abkhaz parliament ratified earlier this year, reduced the position of the ethnic Abkhaz in the region and heightened nationalistic sentiments. Taking this situation into account, Moscow decided to continue its support for Bagapsh, whose legitimacy seems to be based mainly on his pragmatism towards Moscow.

There is a clear risk that the increasingly chaotic actions of Russian military forces may increase the tension between them and local residents of Abkhazia. This would not only reduce the prospects for democratic development, but could also imply a need on the part of the de facto government to apply stronger bureaucratic pressure on the civilians of the region.