When Ilya Remeslo, a longtime Kremlin attack lawyer and propagandist, first turned against Vladimir Putin in March, posting publicly that the Russian president should resign and be brought to justice as “a war criminal and a thief,” the Russian authorities rapidly carted Remeslo off — against his will — to a St. Petersburg psychiatric hospital.
But, in a highly unusual development for a regime that is known to incarcerate its critics for years, Remeslo was freed after 30 days. Now, the pro-Kremlin henchman and blogger, who worked for the presidential administration for about a decade smearing opposition activists, is vowing to remain in Russia and continue a public anti-Putin fight.
“I said from the beginning that I’m not going to stop,” Remeslo told The Washington Post in an interview. “I decided that this is the work of my life.”
As cracks appear in the Russian elite over the war against Ukraine, the deteriorating Russian economy and repressive restrictions, including limits on internet access, Remeslo’s turnabout and continuing open defiance signify a broader divide in the upper reaches of Kremlin power, according to a Russian official, a prominent opposition figure and analysts. The Russian official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
“The scale of dissatisfaction is colossal,” Remeslo said in the interview with The Post, his first with an international media organization since his release. “I have the impression that part of the system is already starting to work against Putin … It’s essentially … similar to what happened at the end of the Soviet Union, when people hated the [Communist] Party and did everything for it to end. Putin’s Russia will follow the same path as the Soviet Union. Everything is being repeated.”
In recent weeks, Putin’s approval rating fell to its lowest level since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, according to VCIOM, the state-controlled polling firm. A chorus of other voices have started speaking out against the government’s handling of the economy and the internet rules, which are set to tighten ahead of Moscow’s annual Victory Day parade on Saturday as jitters mount about Ukrainian drone attacks.
Kremlin watchers say the criticism is part of an internal conflict between a faction in the Russian presidential administration led by Remeslo’s former boss, Sergei Kiriyenko, the technocratic first deputy Kremlin chief who oversees Russia’s political apparatus, and the Federal Security Service (FSB) where Putin built his career.
The security services are widely believed to be behind the clampdown on internet access, fearing it could be used to target Putin and to mobilize anti-government opposition. Some of Putin’s political advisers, however, see the restrictions as stoking anti-government anger in Russia’s highly digitalized society.
“A very big battle for power is going on,” Remeslo said, noting he remains in contact with some former allies in Russian power structures. “The FSB and the administration are very much in conflict.”
“Putin does not have a single fist which only works for him,” he added. “They are all working against each other.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oil tycoon who was once Russia’s richest man and is now a leading Russian opposition figure based in London, said Remeslo’s release was a sign that factions in the Kremlin were supporting him.
“There is an absolutely clear conflict between the presidential administration and the second directorate of the FSB,” Khodorkovsky said, referring to the FSB unit responsible for combating terrorism and defending the Russian constitution.
“These guys have gotten a lot of authority and have started tightening the screws very strongly,” Khodorkovsky added. “The presidential administration is trying to somehow let Putin know the lid could blow off the can.”
One person familiar with the situation said the growing standoff — ahead of parliamentary elections in November — evokes memories of a Kremlin power struggle before Russian President Boris Yeltsin was reelected in 1996.
Then, hard-liners wanted to make sure Yeltsin remained in power by imposing martial law and canceling or postponing the vote, while Russia’s more progressive oligarch class wanted to bankroll Yeltsin’s election campaign and finesse it as much as possible.
“In some senses the same story is being repeated,” the person familiar with the situation said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive political rivalries. “Kiriyenko and his team are trying to convince Putin that he can keep control of the situation in the country through political technologies. And the second service of the FSB is trying to convince Putin that the only way to stabilize the situation in the country is through brutal methods and through tightening the screws.”
In a sign of the standoff, one of Kiriyenko’s closest lieutenants, Sergei Novikov, head of the Kremlin department for social projects, told a conference on demographics that in Russia “it is already impossible to ban something” — a statement interpreted as referencing the internet rules.
“Everywhere we can see chaos in management processes,” Alexander Baunov, a political analyst with the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote last week in a report about the growing divide in the Russian elite. “Relations towards Putin are changing. Economic optimism and the everyday patriotism connected to it are disappearing,” Baunov said. “Finally, the impossibility of winning a war — which has changed and reduced Russia’s advantages to a minimum — is recognized.”
“It’s as if the content of the air has changed in Russia,” he wrote.
As Ukrainian drones reach ever deeper into Russian territory, setting oil refineries and terminals ablaze, and this week hitting a high-rise building just three and a half miles from the Kremlin, public anxiety is rising and Putin appears to be increasing his own personal security.
A report by a European intelligence agency, published in full on Monday by the independent Russian investigative outlet IStories and reported simultaneously by the Financial Times and CNN, said Putin’s Federal Protection Service, or FSO, has significantly boosted security protocols around the president since early March — apparently worried that Putin could be targeted in a drone attack, including by members of Russia’s own elite.
The FSO has tightened security checks on those visiting Putin, while those working with him are forbidden from using mobile phones or any other devices connected to the internet, and are banned from traveling on public transport, according to the European intelligence report. The Washington Post did not independently obtain the intelligence report but in the interview Remeslo described its findings as broadly accurate.
Since the beginning of the war, Putin has increasingly run Russia from a remote system of underground bunkers and, more recently, he has cut back public visits. The periodic shutdown of communications systems in Moscow is in part connected to Putin’s security fears, the report said.
A blame game erupted over failed security measures in December after a senior Russian general, Fanil Sarvarov, was assassinated, the latest in a series of Ukraine-linked attacks, the report said.
The U.S.-Israeli assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was a longtime Putin ally, may have further increased Putin’s security fears and opened the way for the security services to clamp down on access to the internet, Khodorkovsky said.
“In Moscow, Khamenei’s killing was seen as the Americans using internet technology for remote surveillance and since the Russian network is open for this type of remote surveillance they got worried,” Khodorkovsky said.
Putin had been tightening his own personal security ever since his onetime close ally Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the late leader of the Wagner mercenary group, launched an aborted mutiny against the Russian president in June 2023, but protocols were strengthened even further two months ago, Remeslo said.
Remeslo was once part of a team of Kremlin propagandists who targeted Russian opposition figures, including, most prominently, the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Remeslo used his background as a lawyer to testify against the opposition figures in court and smear them online.
In an interview last week with Ksenia Sobchak, a television celebrity and the daughter of Putin’s onetime political mentor, St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak, Remeslo said that he paid a pensioner to file a lawsuit against Navalny alleging fraud related to donations to Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.
The allegations were part of a case that landed Navalny a nine-year jail sentence in March 2022. Navalny was serving that sentence in a remote Arctic penal colony when he died in February 2024 — killed by a rare poison according to Western governments.
Remeslo said he now he regrets his involvement in the Kremlin’s persecution of Navalny, and wants to rectify that by speaking out against Putin, in hopes that other prominent figures will join him in opposing the increasingly oppressive regime.
The disappointment with Putin was a gradual process, he said, first as his realization grew that the war against Ukraine, initially intended to topple Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in days, would drag out far beyond the original plan, and later when the Russian president retreated from view during Prigozhin’s botched uprising and left others to deal with the crisis — evidence, he said, of the president’s personal cowardice.
“I understood that this is not the president I voted for. It’s not a person who is brave or courageous,” Remeslo said. “It’s a completely different person who just fears a real opponent who represents a threat to him.”
For a long time, Remeslo said he hesitated to make any public statement, hoping negotiations with President Donald Trump’s administration would succeed in ending the war.
But in March, when it became clear these talks were going nowhere and Putin was being buoyed to extend the war by oil prices that were surging because of Trump’s own war against Iran, Remeslo said he decided he had to speak out. “It was necessary to try and stop him,” Remeslo said. “It was necessary to speak against him.”
He added: “I decided that if I do it other people would see and it would lead other people to speak too. Because I know that people around me — people from the administration — they think exactly the same.”
Remeslo said he believed that about half the Kremlin administration shares his view, including his former boss, Kiriyenko, as well as some officials from the top ranks of the Russian security services and Defense Ministry, who are more progressively-minded than those driving the repressions, Remeslo said.
“In the administration there are good people,” he said. “They snicker at Putin and say he is very primitive and that he is doing everything to lead the country into an abyss.”
He added: “Of course, publicly they are scared to say this. Because of course they will be put in jail and all their assets will be taken.”
The European intelligence report singled out former defense minister Sergei Shoigu, who now serves as secretary of the National Security Council, as a subject of particular Kremlin concern because he maintained “considerable influence in the military command” and is “associated with the risk of a state coup attempt.” The report did not provide evidence for the claims against Shoigu, a longtime Putin ally.
The arrest of Shoigu’s former deputy minister Ruslan Tsalikov on corruption charges could pose a personal threat to Shoigu, the report said — a view shared by Remeslo, who said he believed Shoigu would be certain to take measures to defend himself.
A spokesperson for the Russian Security Council did not respond to a request for comment about Shoigu.
“Putin will be toppled at some moment by his own circle when he stops being convenient for them completely,” Remeslo said. “This is the result that is awaiting him.”
The post Pro-Kremlin lawyer’s turn against Putin reveals rift in Russian power circles appeared first on Washington Post.
