Russia: Who is Ilia Remeslo, the pro-Putin blogger who changed his mind?

It’s a turnaround that could cost ten years in prison. This Tuesday, the trial of Ilia Remeslo opened in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The 43-year-old man was arrested last July for disseminating “false information” about the Russian army, punishable by ten years in prison since the start of the invasion of Ukraine.

“Putin will be taken away in handcuffs this fall”, “the situation is rapidly deteriorating for Putin”, he wrote on his social networks, on the eve of his arrest. In court, he pleaded not guilty. But the forty-year-old has not always been on this side of the bar.

Lawyer from Nalchik, graduated from the law faculty of Saint Petersburg State University in 2005 according to his Telegram channel, Ilia Remeslo is first and foremost close to the government. In 2014 he became the president of the public organization “St. Petersburg Lawyers Association”. The forty-year-old, media figure, is particularly known for his criticism of the opposition, in particular his fight against Alexeï Navalny, who died in 2024, against whom he testified.

From the start of the “special operation” in Ukraine, he had expressed his sympathies in favor of the invasion. Analysis of his channel by the media Atlantico reveals several hundred publications per day in February 2022. The same in March 2024, during the presidential election which marks the re-election of Vladimir Putin. At that time, the blogger defended a new mandate for the master of the Kremlin and always attacked opposition figures like Boris Nadezhdine. In March 2025, during the peace negotiations between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, he even described Russian diplomacy as a “high-level chess game”.

But last March, he suddenly changed his tone and explained on Telegram the five reasons why he “stopped supporting” Vladimir Putin. He calls him an illegitimate president, a “war criminal” and a “thief”. He also claims that the offensive in Ukraine is a “dead end” causing “millions of deaths” and carried out “only because of the complexes” of the Russian president. “We see opinion leaders or political scientists telling you not to go vote: it’s a 100% paid Kremlin speech,” he lamented more recently. “Putin remains silent, downplaying the problem,” he added about the country’s fuel crisis. It's no longer about gasoline, it's about treating people like cattle. »

In March, the virulent attack on the Kremlin caused him to be hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital in Saint Petersburg, a place known for being a place of internment of political dissidents during the Soviet era. In an interview given to controversial presenter Ksenia Sobchak, after her exit from the institution in April, and transcribed by the independent Russian-speaking media Meduza, Remeslo confirms having worked for the presidential administration from the mid-2010s to the end of 2025.