Ilya Remeslo had spent years as a reliable voice for the Kremlin, building a Telegram following of 90,000 by attacking Putin's critics. Then, late on Tuesday night, he posted a manifesto entitled "Five reasons why I stopped supporting Vladimir Putin", and it went viral almost immediately (some of the main media media outlets covered the story: Reuters, The Guardian, etc). By Thursday, he was in a psychiatric hospital.
In the post on Telegram, Remeslo accused Putin of prosecuting a "failing war" in Ukraine that had killed millions and wrecked Russia's economy, leaving ordinary citizens to bear the cost. He called on Putin to resign and face trial as a war criminal. It was an extraordinary reversal from someone who had made a career doing the state's rhetorical work.
Within roughly 48 hours, St Petersburg's independent newspaper Fontanka reported that Remeslo had been hospitalised in the city's Psychiatric Hospital No. 3. The hospital's information desk, when contacted, confirmed that a patient bearing his name was registered and able to receive packages. No reason for his admission was provided.
"Vladimir Putin is not a legitimate president. Vladimir Putin must resign and be brought to trial as a war criminal and a thief." This comes from Remeslo's viral Telegram post, published the night of March 18, 2026.
The practice of confining political dissidents to psychiatric institutions (known in Soviet times as punitive psychiatry or psikhushka) was a hallmark of the Soviet state. Diagnosed with invented conditions such as "sluggish schizophrenia," critics of the government could be detained indefinitely without trial. Human rights organisations have tracked a resurgence of such practices in Russia in recent years, raising alarms that the machinery of psychiatric repression is being dusted off for a new era.
The echoes of Soviet history are not lost on observers. Psychiatric detention as a tool of political control (confining inconvenient people not in prisons but in hospitals, reframing dissent as mental illness) was among the most chilling innovations of the Soviet state. Its apparent reappearance in 2026 carries a weight that no neutral bureaucratic language can quite conceal.
What makes Remeslo's case especially striking is not simply what he said, but who he was before he said it. He was not an opposition activist or an exile broadcasting from abroad. He was a pro-Kremlin voice, a man who had made a career of doing the state's rhetorical work, discrediting those who challenged Putin. His reversal was not the act of an outsider throwing stones. It was a defection from within, and perhaps that made it more threatening, not less.
Reuters was unable to independently verify the circumstances of Remeslo's hospitalisation, and Fontanka did not specify on what grounds he may have been admitted.