This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Valerie Sanderson and at 1400 hours GMT on Friday the 15th of March

these are our main stories. Russian voters are taking part in a presidential election which Vladimir Putin is bound to

win.

The first ship carrying aid to Gaza since the start of the current conflict has arrived

off the coast of the territory.

The leaders of Germany, France and Poland are meeting in Berlin hoping to agree on how to aid Ukraine.

Also in this podcast... You can see there's now a second generation of artists who've

taken up Keith Herring and you can't really force that. Before there was Banksy

Keith Herring was a pioneer of graffiti art.

A new biography reflects on a life cut short.

We start in Russia where three days of voting in the country's presidential election

is underway. The result is a foregone conclusion and will confirm yet another

six-year presidential term for Vladimir Putin, his fifth.

The elections are being held at a time when Russia is making headway in its invasion of Ukraine.

I asked Vitali Shefchenko our Russia analyst from BBC monitoring how the Russian authorities

ensure the result. One way is making sure there are no credible challenges to Vladimir Putin, but also the people who are on the commissions, which count the votes,

a lot of them, well, they represent the government and earlier the BBC spoke to a member of one such

commission who we cannot name and he described how this works.

In my commission there was no signs of forging the results, but there was no no signs of forging the results but there were some

manipulations on the previous elections in 2018 we had more than the 100 people

on our polling station that do not live in this area.

...