On the evening of March 17, Ilya Remeslo, a 42-year-old Russian lawyer in St. published a notice to his 90,000 Telegram followers called “Five reasons why I stopped supporting Vladimir Putin.” The Russian president, he wrote, had waged a “final war” against Ukraine that had already cost up to 2 million casualties (a figure far exceeding most independent estimates), destroyed the economy, and suppressed all domestic opposition. Now, Remeslo wrote, the Kremlin’s cyberstalking and preparations to ban the Telegram messaging app were dismantling the last vestiges of infrastructure where ordinary Russians could share their views with one another. Putin, he concluded, is no longer a “legitimate president” and must “resign and be brought to justice as a war criminal and thief.”
Within 48 hours, Remeslo he was in a psychiatric ward. The exact circumstances of his arrival are still unclear, but the media trust report that it was not voluntary. Vladimir Solovyov, one of Russia’s most-watched talk show hosts, addressed the show on air anonymously, lay off Remeslo as “a lawyer who has lost his mind” and whose “nerves could not take it.”
On the evening of March 17, Ilya Remeslo, a 42-year-old Russian lawyer in St. published a notice to his 90,000 Telegram followers called “Five reasons why I stopped supporting Vladimir Putin.” The Russian president, he wrote, had waged a “final war” against Ukraine that had already cost up to 2 million casualties (a figure far exceeding most independent estimates), destroyed the economy, and suppressed all domestic opposition. Now, Remeslo wrote, the Kremlin’s cyberstalking and preparations to ban the Telegram messaging app were dismantling the last vestiges of infrastructure where ordinary Russians could share their views with one another. Putin, he concluded, is no longer a “legitimate president” and must “resign and be brought to justice as a war criminal and thief.”
Within 48 hours, Remeslo he was in a psychiatric ward. The exact circumstances of his arrival are still unclear, but the media trust report that it was not voluntary. Vladimir Solovyov, one of Russia’s most-watched talk show hosts, addressed the show on air anonymously, lay off Remeslo as “a lawyer who has lost his mind” and whose “nerves could not take it.”
What makes Remeslo’s outburst important is not the substance of his complaint. Russia’s independent press, now published in exile, has been denouncing the war for years, and pro-war opposition supporters have condemned the invasion as wasteful and mismanaged. almost since it beganalthough they agree with Putin’s goal to destroy or at least strengthen Ukraine. That Russia has lost the current war is common knowledge even among the supporters of the invasion. But Remeslo took a step that everyone else had been reluctant to take: He blamed the massive failure not on incompetent generals or defense officials, but on Putin himself.
Remeslo is no ordinary disgruntled patriot. He credits himself – not without merit – for building the legal case that sent opposition leader Alexei Navalny to a remote northern prison where he eventually died, apparently. poisoned to death. Remeslo’s turn would be surprising on its own: A professional whistleblower who built a career suppressing opposition to the Kremlin has now turned his documents against the people who wrote them. Surprisingly, he committed himself to the psychiatric ward in a way that awakens standard Soviet practice pathological resistance as the criminal lunatic that his own work glorifying Russia’s past helped reform.
But there is nothing surprising about Remeslo’s manifesto and its timing. It looked like Russia’s offensive in Ukraine had stalled for months at a staggering cost in Russian life– and in the middle of stricter internet suppression in Russia’s history, including the daily blackouts in Moscow and St. new law providing security services disconnection force any user without a court order. Remeslo also wrote his statement during the biggest protests since the first weeks of the invasion, when Siberian farmers blocked roads to prevent authorities from slaughtering thousands of cattle over a disease many of them do not believe exists.
Taken separately, these events mark a rough couple of weeks for Putin. Taken together, they mark a major change: the Kremlin is no more just lose control of the narrative; it is now dismantling the very infrastructure it used to build support: the messaging apps its military relies on, the ecosystem of pro-war bloggers that sustained the morale and grassroots loyalty that kept millions of Russians loyal.
The move—and planned ban—of Telegram is the clearest example. Telegram is not the only messaging app in Russia, though and close to 100 million users at last count, it is the most popular. It is a state propaganda tool and one of the last channels of personal and social communication that is not directly controlled by the Russian government. (VK, Mail.ru, and others popular technology platforms are nationalized.) Telegram is where loyalists and dissidents run popular public channels; where Russian troops at the front in Ukraine coordinate military operations; and where they and their followers complain about “meat attacks,” incompetent commanders, and chronic shortages of everything from ammunition to transportation.” Like Ivan Filippov, a Russian journalist who monitors the pro-war field on the Telegraphhas noted, enthusiasm in these circles has recently run deep. Which shouldn’t be surprising, as Russian losses approach casualty levels with no end in sight.
The Kremlin’s response to online dissent has been twofold. First, it has choke Telegram and WhatsApp—two popular messaging apps not controlled by the Kremlin—have been banned from being used inside Russia. A total ban set to follow. Second, the government has pushed the development of a new government-sanctioned all-in-one platform, MAX—modeled on China’s best apps that combine messaging, social networking, payments, government services, and other functions—that will be indispensable for schools, government institutions, and the military. MAX has met him near-universal enmityand even the faithful see it as a monitoring and control tool. Protests against Telegram restrictions have been suppressed in almost a dozen provinces using external justifications, including existing COVID restrictions and, in one city, supposed to precede of “tree inspection.”
Then came the wider web turn off more than a message. In some regionsthe mobile network is completely disabled weekostensibly to prevent Ukrainian drones from using Russian mobile networks to surf—restrictions that, by any available evidence, have not prevented a single strike. Basically, shutdowns have reached Moscow and Stwhose inhabitants have so far been largely untouched by the wartime deprivation caused for a long time by the country’s poorest regions.
These measures are not only disturbing those who support the opposition and the youth. They are hitting the very core of the government: office workers who can’t do their jobs, businesses who can’t handle cashless transactions, taxi drivers who can no longer navigate Moscow or get customers through ride-hailing apps. In detail that borders on parody, Moscow’s public pay toilets they have stopped working because their payment systems are not on the government’s whitelist of authorized services available during a blackout—unlike state media and the Kremlin’s website. Within minutes they manage to get online, Ordinary Russians are complaining a lot that these restrictions are not only unnecessary but completely destroy their lives. Perhaps as a result of this strong opposition, the authorities in Moscow seem to have partial reduction restrictions earlier this week, although they could be fully restored at any time.
Big cities are not alone. In the Novosibirsk region of Siberia, authorities declared a state of emergency due to outbreaks of pasteurellosis, a bacterial infection that can affect humans and animals, and ordered the mass slaughter of cattle. Within days, local and independent outlets were posting videos of farmers standing over ditches filled with burning carcasses and confront the police and officers who had come to catch the animals to their owners‘eyeslook very healthy. The farmers did not get any compensation, and the details of the dispute are classified. One case directly links the war and the cattle crisis together: Anton Dorozhenkoa veteran Ukrainian soldier who used his war pay to buy a herd of livestock, told the media that authorities threatened to confiscate his livestock without compensation unless he signed a waiver to surrender them by killing them. The property that the government paid him for fighting his war, the government now claims to destroy.
The image set by propaganda of a powerful Russia – once an unstoppable war machine and a good state – is crumbling in many directions. For years, the Kremlin relied on an industry of loyalists like Solovyov whose job it was to praise Putin’s war and civilian policies and attack his critics as anti-Russian traitors. But even top Kremlin supporters are now struggling to keep the story straight. The cracks no longer lie with the usual suspects, such as anti-Kremlin defectors and patriotic bloggers displeasure with the conduct of the war.
The pillars of the propaganda machine itself are tottering. Ivan Otrakovsky, a Chechen war veteran and leader of a patriotic veterans organization, tried to support the farmers who were protesting the confiscation of livestock – and immediately. to be arrested. Even Solovyov is not immune: he spoke on the air about the inability of the Russian government to provide reliable military communications after the loss of access to Starlink. it was quietly cut from the broadcastaccording to blogger Michael Nacke. The range of acceptable speech has dwindled to nothing—with no coherent narrative to replace what has been silenced.
None of this means that Putin is about to fall. The security apparatus is still formidable, society is obsessed with structure, and war continues to generate enough money and fear to keep most Russians compliant. What has changed is the direction of the government’s repressive forces. For much of the war, that coercion was directed at Ukraine and domestic political opposition that could be imprisoned, deported, or declared insane without consequence. Now the Kremlin is turning that equipment against the infrastructure and people it needs to continue the war. Telegram, the program that carried war propaganda to millions of phones, is being choked by the government that used it to broadcast its message. Remeslo, the man who helped build the legal machinery to silence opponents, is now in the clutches of that machine. Farmers who never thought about politics are blocking the road because the government that wants them to believe in its war cannot tell them the truth about their cattle. The Kremlin spent years creating a general narrative that the truth could not interfere. Now it realizes that when you close every window, you are also cutting off your own air.
