Ilya Remeslo sends Telegram post titled ‘Five reasons why I stopped supporting Vladimir Putin’ to his 90,000 followers
For years, Ilya Remeslo was a reliable pro-Kremlin operator, going after critics of the regime and smearing independent journalists, bloggers and opposition politicians.
Then the 42-year-old lawyer abruptly turned on the country’s most powerful man. Late on Tuesday, Remeslo posted a manifesto to his 90,000 Telegram followers titled: “Five reasons why I stopped supporting Vladimir Putin.”
In it, he accused the “illegitimate” Russian president of waging a “failing war” in Ukraine that had caused millions of casualties and wrecked the economy, and argued that Putin’s more than two decades in power illustrated how “absolute power corrupts”, calling on him to step aside.
The post sent shock waves through Russia’s online sphere, fuelling confusion over how such a loyalist could reverse course so abruptly – and whether the shift was genuine.
