Russians will go to the polls on Sunday to choose a new president from among five candidates.

It will be the sixth presidential election after the presidential system was established in the country in 1991.

According to local media, some 65 percent of the 109 million eligible voters are expected to cast their ballots at 94,000 polling stations across the country, as well as 384 overseas stations in more than 140 countries.

The following is a review of the previous five presidential elections:

Russia's first-ever presidential election was held under Soviet-era election law, on June 12, 1991 when Boris Yeltsin, 60, was elected with 57.3 percent of the vote. The Russian Federation became the successor of the Soviet Union after the latter collapsed at the end of 1991.

In the first round of the second presidential election held on June 16, 1996, Yeltsin gained only 35.2 percent of the vote, a narrow lead of 3 percent over his communist rival Gennady Zyuganov. He defeated Zyuganov and won reelection in the run-off in July by forging a union with retired General Alexander Lebed, who garnered 14.7 percent of the vote to finish third in the first round.

On Dec. 31, 1999, six months before the expiry of his term, Yeltsin decided to step down and appointed then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as the acting head of state.

Putin, riding a wave of popularity for his bold military actions against Chechen rebels, his no-nonsense incorruptible image and his promise to rejuvenate the Russian nation, won the third presidential election held on March 26, 2000, with 52.52 percent of the vote.

In the years that followed, the stable political situation at home, steady economic growth and improvement of Russians' standard of living all helped boost Putin's prestige. On March 14, 2004, he won a landslide re-election victory in the presidential election by obtaining 71.31 percent of the vote.

In December 2007, upon Putin's recommendation, then First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was jointly nominated by the ruling United Party and three other pro-Kremlin parties as a presidential candidate.

As pre-election polls predicted, Medvedev won by a landslide with 70.28 percent of the vote in the fifth presidential elections held on March 2, 2008. Putin, as he promised before the election, became prime minister in the new government.