On the evening of March 17, Ilya Remeslo, a 42-year-old Russian lawyer in St. Petersburg, published a manifesto to his 90,000 Telegram followers titled “Five reasons why I stopped supporting Vladimir Putin.” The Russian president, he wrote, had waged a “dead-end war” against Ukraine that has already cost up to 2 million casualties (a figure exceeding even the highest independent assessments), destroyed the economy, and crushed all domestic opposition. Now, Remeslo wrote, the Kremlin’s throttling of the internet and preparations to ban the messaging app Telegram were dismantling the last remains of the infrastructure through which ordinary Russians could share their views with one another. Putin, he concluded, is no longer “a legitimate president” and must “resign and be brought to trial as a war criminal and a thief.”

Within 48 hours, Remeslo was in a psychiatric ward. The exact circumstances of his arrival there remain unclear, but loyalist media report that it was not voluntary. Vladimir Solovyov, one of Russia’s most-watched talk-show hosts, addressed the episode on air without naming him, dismissing Remeslo as “a lawyer who has lost his mind” and whose “nerves couldn’t take it.”

On the evening of March 17, Ilya Remeslo, a 42-year-old Russian lawyer in St. Petersburg, published a manifesto to his 90,000 Telegram followers titled “Five reasons why I stopped supporting Vladimir Putin.” The Russian president, he wrote, had waged a “dead-end war” against Ukraine that has already cost up to 2 million casualties (a figure exceeding even the highest independent assessments), destroyed the economy, and crushed all domestic opposition. Now, Remeslo wrote, the Kremlin’s throttling of the internet and preparations to ban the messaging app Telegram were dismantling the last remains of the infrastructure through which ordinary Russians could share their views with one another. Putin, he concluded, is no longer “a legitimate president” and must “resign and be brought to trial as a war criminal and a thief.”

Within 48 hours, Remeslo was in a psychiatric ward. The exact circumstances of his arrival there remain unclear, but loyalist media report that it was not voluntary. Vladimir Solovyov, one of Russia’s most-watched talk-show hosts, addressed the episode on air without naming him, dismissing Remeslo as “a lawyer who has lost his mind” and whose “nerves couldn’t take it.”

What makes Remeslo’s outburst significant is not the substance of his complaints. Independent Russian media now published in exile have been criticizing the war along similar lines for years, and pro-war ultranationalists have been denouncing the invasion as wasteful and mismanaged almost since it began, although they agree with Putin’s goal of destroying or at least vassalizing Ukraine. That Russia has effectively lost the war is now commonplace even among the invasion’s most ardent supporters. But Remeslo took the one step everyone else has been reluctant to take: He blamed the colossal failure not on incompetent generals or defense officials, but on Putin himself.

Remeslo is no ordinary disgruntled nationalist. He credits himself—not entirely without merit—with building the legal case that sent opposition leader Alexei Navalny to the remote northern prison where he ultimately died, apparently poisoned to death. Remeslo’s trajectory would be remarkable on its own: A professional informant who built a career crushing opposition to the Kremlin has now turned his scripts against the people who wrote them. Ironically, he was committed to a psychiatric ward in a manner that evokes the typical Soviet practice of pathologizing dissent as criminal insanity that his own work to glorify the Russian past helped rehabilitate.

But there is nothing ironic about Remeslo’s manifesto and its timing. It appeared as the Russian offensive in Ukraine had stalled for months at an astonishing cost in Russian lives—and in the middle of the most aggressive internet crackdown in Russian history, including daily mobile outages in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the nationwide throttling of Telegram, the purging of virtual private networks (with which users can access forbidden sites), and a new law granting the security services thepower to disconnect any user without a court order. Remeslo also wrote his statement during the largest protests since the first weeks of the invasion, as Siberian farmers blocked roads to prevent the authorities from slaughtering thousands of head of cattle over a disease many of them do not believe exists.

Taken separately, these events mark several bad weeks for Putin. Taken together, they signal a major shift: The Kremlin is no longer just losing control of the narrative; it is now dismantling the very infrastructure it used to build support: the messaging apps its own army relies on, the ecosystem of pro-war bloggers that sustained morale, and the baseline state credibility that kept tens of millions of apolitical Russians compliant.

The throttling—and planned banning—of Telegram is the clearest illustration. Telegram is not just a messaging app in Russia, though with close to 100 million users at last count, it is by far the most popular. It is both a vehicle of state propaganda and one of the last modes of private and social communication that is not directly controlled by the Russian government. (VK, Mail.ru, and other popular tech platforms have been nationalized.) Telegram is where both loyalists and dissidents run popular public channels; where Russian soldiers on the front in Ukraine coordinate military operations; and where they and their supporters voice grievances about “meat assaults,” incompetent commanders, and chronic shortages of everything from ammunition to transport. As Ivan Filippov, a Russian journalist who monitors the pro-war sphere on Telegram, has noted, morale in these circles has recently plunged to extreme depths. Which should not be surprising, as Russian losses are approaching mass-casualty levels with neither an end nor tangible results in sight.

The Kremlin’s response to online dissent has been twofold. First, it has throttled Telegram and WhatsApp—the two most popular messaging apps not controlled by the Kremlin—to make them all but unusable inside Russia. A full ban is set to follow. Second, the regime has pushed the development of a new state-approved all-in-one platform, MAX—modeled on Chinese super-apps that combine messaging, social media, payment, government services, and other functions—that will be compulsory for schools, government institutions, and the military. MAX has been met withnear-universal hostility, with even loyalists regarding it as an instrument of surveillance and control. Protests against the Telegram restrictions have been suppressed across nearly a dozen regions using threadbare justifications, including still-existing COVID restrictions and, in one city, the supposed precedence of a “tree inspection.”

Then came broader internet shutdowns beyond messaging. In some regions, mobile internet has been shut off entirely for weeks, ostensibly to prevent Ukrainian drones from using Russian mobile networks to navigate—restrictions that have not, by any available evidence, prevented a single strike. Critically, the shutdowns have reached Moscow and St. Petersburg, whose inhabitants have so far been largely untouched by wartime deprivations long borne by the country’s poorer regions.

These measures do not just inconvenience opposition sympathizers and teenagers. They are hitting the regime’s own base: office workers who cannot do their jobs, businesses unable to process cashless transactions, taxi drivers who can no longer navigate Moscow or get customers via ride-hailing apps. In a detail that borders on parody, Moscow’s public pay toilets have stopped working because their payment systems are not on the government’s white list of approved services available during internet shutdowns—in contrast to state media and the Kremlin’s website. In the few minutes they manage to get online, ordinary Russians are complaining en masse that the restrictions are not merely unnecessary but actively destroying their livelihoods. Perhaps as the result of this massive backlash, the Moscow authorities seem to have partially eased the restrictions earlier this week, although they could be fully brought back at any time.

The big cities are not alone. In Siberia’s Novosibirsk region, authorities declared a state of emergency over outbreaks of pasteurellosis, a bacterial infection that can affect humans and animals, and ordered the mass culling of cattle. Within days, local and independent outlets were publishing videos of farmers standing over trenches filled with burning carcasses and confronting police and officials who had arrived to seize animals that, to their owners’ eyes, looked perfectly healthy. Farmers received barely any compensation, and the details of the crisis are classified. One case ties the war and the cattle crisis together directly: Anton Dorozhenko, a Ukraine veteran who used his combat payouts to buy a herd of livestock, told media that authorities threatened to confiscate his animals without compensation unless he signed a waiver surrendering them for culling. The wealth the state paid him for fighting its war, the state now demands to destroy.

The propaganda-imposed image of a mighty Russia—at once an unstoppable war machine and a benevolent state—is crumbling on multiple fronts. For years, the Kremlin relied on an industry of loyalists like Solovyov whose job it was to praise Putin’s war and civilian policies and attack his critics as anti-Russian traitors. But even the Kremlin’s own chief supporters are now struggling to keep the story straight. The cracks are no longer confined to the usual suspects, such as anti-Kremlin exiles and über-patriotic bloggers unhappy with the conduct of the war.

The pillars of the propaganda apparatus itself are buckling. Ivan Otrakovsky, a Chechnya war veteran and leader of a patriotic veterans’ organization, attempted to support the farmers protesting the livestock cull—and was promptly arrested. Even Solovyov is not immune: His on-air rant about the Russian government’s inability to provide reliable military communications after the loss of Starlink access was quietly cut from the broadcast, according to blogger Michael Nacke. The range of permissible speech has shrunk to almost nothing—without a coherent narrative to replace what has been silenced.

None of this means Putin is about to fall. The security apparatus remains formidable, society is atomized by design, and the war continues to generate enough money and fear to keep most Russians compliant. What has changed is the direction of the regime’s repressive energy. For most of the war, that coercion was directed at Ukraine and a neutered domestic political opposition that could be jailed, exiled, or declared insane without consequence. Now the Kremlin is turning that apparatus against the very infrastructure and people it needs to sustain the war. Telegram, the app that carried the war’s propaganda to millions of phones, is being strangled by the state that used it to promote its message. Remeslo, the man who helped build the legal machinery to silence dissent, is now in the claws of that machine. Farmers who never thought about politics are blocking roads because the state that asks them to trust its war cannot tell them the truth about their cows. The Kremlin spent years constructing a narrative so total that reality could not intrude. It is now discovering that when you seal every window, you also cut off your own air.