Wartime Russia is showing its leader the one thing he has spent a quarter century trying to prevent: visible fracture. On March 17, 2026, Ilya Remeslo, a 42-year-old St. Petersburg lawyer with a career as a Kremlin informant behind him, posted a manifesto titled “Five reasons why I stopped supporting Vladimir Putin.” for an audience of 90,000 Telegram followers. Two days later he was in a psychiatric ward; loyalist media reported the arrival was not voluntary.
The text was blunt. Putin, Remeslo wrote, had pursued a “dead-end war” in Ukraine that cost up to 2 million casualties by his count, wrecked the economy and finished off what remained of domestic opposition. The president, he concluded, was no longer “a legitimate president” and should “resign and be brought to trial as a war criminal and a thief.”
What made the outburst matter, Alexey Kovalev wrote in a March 27 analysis for Foreign Policy, was not the complaint but the address on the envelope. Exiled independent journalists and pro-war ultranationalists have said as much for years; the difference here is that Remeslo laid the failure at Putin’s door rather than at the doors of failed generals. His biography sharpens the point: the man takes credit, with some plausibility, for the legal work that put Alexei Navalny in the far-northern prison where the opposition leader later died.
Shutdowns Reach Moscow
The manifesto landed at a bad moment for the state. Moscow’s offensive in Ukraine has been bogged down for months at a startling cost in Russian lives, and the Kremlin has answered with the harshest internet crackdown in the country’s history: mobile connections cut daily in the capital and St. Petersburg, virtual private networks swept away, and a new law letting the security services unplug any user without a court order. Telegram, by far the most popular messaging app at close to 100 million users, and WhatsApp have been throttled toward uselessness ahead of a full ban, while a compulsory state super-app, MAX, is being pushed into schools, government bodies and the armed forces. Even loyalists call it an instrument of surveillance.
The restrictions land on the regime’s own constituency: white-collar staff who cannot work, shops that cannot take cashless payment, taxi drivers whose ride-hailing apps have gone dark. Moscow’s street pay toilets quit working because their payment systems failed to make the government’s approved white list. Demonstrations against the Telegram curbs have been broken up across roughly a dozen regions on flimsy grounds, from still-official COVID rules to one city’s cited need for a “tree inspection.”
Cattle, Trenches and Burning Carcasses
In the Novosibirsk region of Siberia, an emergency was declared over pasteurellosis, a bacterial infection, and herds were ordered culled. Video published by local and independent outlets showed farmers guarding trenches of burning carcasses and squaring off with police sent to take animals the owners considered healthy. Compensation was thin; the crisis file is classified. Anton Dorozhenko, a Ukraine veteran who spent his combat payouts on livestock, told journalists the state would seize his animals without payment unless he waived his rights and handed them over.
The loudspeakers are flickering too. Vladimir Solovyov, among the most-watched hosts on Russian television, waved Remeslo away on air as “a lawyer who has lost his mind” whose “nerves couldn’t take it.” Yet the same Solovyov’s studio rant about the army’s lost Starlink connectivity and unreliable military communications was edited out of the broadcast, per blogger Michael Nacke, and Ivan Otrakovsky, a Chechnya veteran who heads a patriotic veterans’ organization, was arrested days after backing the farmers.
The Older Baseline
None of this means the president is about to fall. In an October 2023 assessment for the Council on Foreign Relations, Thomas Graham described a ruler positioned at the heart of a sprawling patronage network whose abrupt removal could bring the whole structure down on every elite inside it, and put his approval near 80 percent. What has shifted by 2026, in Kovalev’s reading, is where the coercion points. Force once spent on Ukraine and a broken opposition now aims at the state’s own machinery of consent: the apps, the bloggers, the everyday credibility that kept huge numbers of apolitical Russians quiet. The system built to project monolithic authority has started dismantling the instruments that built its support.
Sources
- How Firm Is Vladimir Putin’s Grip on Power? | Council on Foreign Relations
- Russia's War Setbacks and Internet Shutdowns Show Cracks in Putin's Power
