To Russia now and voters there are about to elect their next president. There are eight candidates to choose from on the ballot, though little doubt among pollsters that current President Vladimir Putin will win in the first round. But according to the same polls, the results can dramatically vary depending upon the region of the country. Our Aljosa Milenkovic is in Moscow with more.

This is the Kremlin. Headquarters of the Russian president. Its current tenant Vladimir Putin aims at staying for another six years.

ALJOSA MILENKOVIC MOSCOW "But seven other candidates would like to dislodge him and sit in his chair in the building behind me. So, who are the candidates for the position of the most powerful person in Russia?"

Let's start with the front runner. Sixty-five year-old Vladimir Putin. A Saint Petersburg native, who later became KGB operative, who worked in East Germany. He's been in the top corridors of power in Russia starting in 1998, when he became the head of the FSB, only to advance to the prime minister's position a year later. In the year 2000, he replaced Boris Yeltsin as Russian president.

For the next 18 years, Putin was either the president or prime minister. During his terms in those offices, Russia resolved the Chechnya crisis and had a short five-day conflict with Georgia.

It also annexed Crimea and engaged in a military intervention in Syria, supporting President Assad. Putin helped to transform his country's economy from the ashes of 1990's into a Top 10 world ranking of GDP purchasing power, according to the World Bank.

He's not a champion of the West. But Putin did create a strategic alliance with China that helped Russia propel it out of rough economic and geo-strategic waters.

Pollsters are predicting that Putin will receive close to 70% of the votes in the first round of the elections, but much fewer in Moscow itself.

As for the other candidates, pollsters predict 57-year-old Pavel Grudinin will finish second after Putin.

He has only just recently become a member of the Communist Party and is running as its candidate.

The leader of the Russian Communist Party Gennady Zyuganov decided not to run this time. Grudinin operates a Soviet style collective farm that still keeps the name: "Sovkhoz Lenin."

He has claimed a number of times it's the last island of socialism in Russia although it is run in capitalist manner with shareholders.

As such, he's attracting voters who feel that Russian society needs to take better care of its blue collar workers.

Pollsters predict that he'll receive around seven percent of the votes.

Running third among the presidential candidates in Russia is the unconventional politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party.

Zhirinovsky is known for his sometimes violent behavior in public. He has had a number of physical confrontations with political opponents and a history of verbal abuse, but yet, because of his hardline nationalistic and populist rhetoric, pollsters predict that he'll attract between five and six percent of the vote. Sobchak, Yavlinsky, Titov, Baburin, and Suraykin, according to the polls will hardly cross the 1% of the votes on the elections.

One thing seems certain, if election polls can be trusted, the outcome of the Sunday elections in Russia will not be a surprise. Aljosa Milenkovic, CGTN, Moscow.