A Kremlin Cheerleader Rips Into Putin. A Day Later, He's In A Psychiatric Hospital.

In the months before and after Aleksei Navalny's January 2021 return to Russia, a bombastic pro-Kremlin lawyer named Ilya Remeslo led the public charge against the gadfly opposition activist and his Anti-Corruption Foundation.

Navalny, who had been treated in Germany for a near-fatal poisoning linked to Russian security services, was arrested immediately upon arriving in Moscow. Six months later, in June 2021, after a Moscow court declared the foundation an "extremist organization," Remeslo crowed triumphantly.

"Swatted like a fly," he said in a post to X.

Remeslo's latest broadside appeared this week, a message as dizzying as it was straightforward: The Russian president must be jailed.

"Vladimir Putin is not a legitimate president," he wrote in a post to Telegram on March 17. "He must resign and be brought to justice as a war criminal and thief."

Lacerating criticism of the Kremlin is a rarity these days; hundreds of Russians have been jailed for "discrediting the armed forces" under a law passed days after the state of the February 2022 invasion.

But for a Kremlin cheerleader like Remeslo to say what he said caused whiplash among supporters of the late Navalny, Russia's far-flung and fractured opposition, and Kremlin watchers alike.

The mystery deepened further on March 19 with reports that Remeslo had been admitted to a St. Petersburg psychiatric hospital. There was no confirmation of the reporting by Fontanka, a well-known St. Petersburg news outlet, and it was unclear whether Remeslo had been admitted voluntarily or otherwise.

Sergei Markov, a political analyst once close to the Kremlin but who has since been blacklisted, said Remeslo checked himself into the hospital on March 18 and speculated it might have been a way to avoid a possible criminal investigation.

Remeslo could not be reached for comment. Veteran journalist Aleksandr Plyushev, who interviewed Remeslo after the release of his critical Telegram post, said Remeslo was not answering phone calls or WhatsApp messages as of March 19.

In an interview with the Russian-language news organization Agentstvo published on March 18, Remeslo repeated some of his criticism of Putin and said he did not plan to leave the country.

"They can't really jail everyone for criticizing Putin," he was quoted as saying . "That's nonsense."

'Long Live Freedom, Dammit!'

Prior to his March 17 Telegram post, Remeslo was widely known as an outspoken supporter of the Kremlin and Putin, as well as Russia's war on Ukraine. He used his legal background to attack opposition figures and file complaints to try and prompt criminal investigations.

His legal broadsides were seen by observers as a barometer of official sentiment toward Navalny, who ended up dying in 2024 in a maximum-security Arctic prison. Five European countries concluded that he was poisoned by an exotic frog toxin and all but accused the Russian government of murdering him.

According to the Insider, another exiled Russian media organization, Remeslo's campaigns were coordinated with Presidential Administration, a powerful policymaking body within the office of the Russian presidency. He confirmed that in his interview with Agentstvo.

In his March 17 post, titled Five Reasons Why I Stopped Supporting Vladimir Putin, Remeslo criticized the Ukraine war and accused Putin of impoverishing Russians, crushing Internet freedom and independent media, and destroying the political opposition.

"What started as a 'police operation' has now claimed 1-2 million casualties," he said, referring to the all-out war on Ukraine, now in its fifth year. "The war is being waged solely to satisfy Putin's insecurities; we, ordinary citizens, gain nothing from it, we only lose."

Residents leave the area after a five-story residential building was hit by a ballistic missile in Kharkiv amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early March.

"He's afraid of debates and fair elections, because the emperor has no clothes," Remeslo wrote of Putin. "Long live freedom, dammit!"

Among Russia's scattered and divided opposition, reactions ranged from skeptical to incredulous.

Leonid Volkov, who headed Navalny's 2018 presidential campaign and now lives in exile, described Remeslo's manifesto as "the most amazing mid-air flip I've ever seen."

"I find it hard to imagine any arrangement in which someone in the presidential administration would greenlight Remeslo going after Putin personally," he said in a post to X. "That opens a far too dangerous Pandora's box. It crosses every red line."

"Something doesn't add up," he wrote.

"In my opinion, this could be either a nervous breakdown or some kind of personal grudge," said Andrei Pivovarov, an opposition activist now living outside of Russia. "He's overestimating his abilities and thinking he'll just explain his situation to everyone and everything will change."

He also suggested a parallel with past examples of public figures who have harshly criticized Kremlin politics; for example, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Group mercenary chief who mercilessly lambasted the top Russian military officials until he died in a mysterious plane crash -- two months after leading a short-lived mutiny against Moscow.

"Many people who achieve a certain level of power develop a sense of stardom," Pivovarov told RFE/RL's Russian Service. "They think that if they say something seditious about the government, no one will mess with them."