A pro-Kremlin figure who unexpectedly denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine in a social media post this week that went viral has been placed in a psychiatric facility, the hospital said on Thursday.
Ilya Remeslo made a career denouncing Putin’s critics until he became one himself, posting a manifesto late on Tuesday to his 90,000 followers on Telegram entitled: “Five reasons why I stopped supporting Vladimir Putin.”
He said Putin had prosecuted a “failing war” in Ukraine that had killed millions and torpedoed Russia’s economy to the detriment of its citizens’ well-being.
“Vladimir Putin is not a legitimate president. Vladimir Putin must resign and be brought to trial as a war criminal and a thief,” Remeslo wrote in his post.
His about-face this week surprised Russia’s pro-war blogger community and the exiled anti-Kremlin opposition alike.
On Thursday, St Petersburg’s Fontanka newspaper reported Remeslo had been hospitalized in the city’s Psychiatric Hospital No. 3.
Reuters was unable to reach Remeslo himself or determine how he came to be hospitalized.
A woman who answered the hospital’s telephone number confirmed to Reuters that a man with the name, patronymic and surname matching Remeslo’s had been admitted to the facility.
The hospital worker, who did not give her name, said she did not have details about when Remeslo had been admitted and on what grounds.
Remeslo, a 42-year-old lawyer and former member of a Kremlin-controlled advisory body, had in the past heavily criticized the late opposition figure Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most prominent critic who died in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024.
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