21 March, 11:21
On Monday evening, March 17, Ilya Remeslo's Telegram channel looked like any other day in the life of a Kremlin loyalist: a comment on cattle slaughter in Siberia, a cautious remark about a new bill targeting journalists, an obituary for the Georgian Catholicos.
Then — like a crack splitting through spring asphalt — came the manifesto: "Five Reasons I Stopped Supporting Vladimir Putin." A sixth reason followed, about palaces and yachts. Then video messages demanding Putin be tried as a war criminal.
By Wednesday, Remeslo was in Psychiatric Hospital No. 3 named after Skvortsov-Stepanov in St. Petersburg — in the ward for patients with first-episode psychosis.
Official explanations multiplied immediately: his account was hacked (Remeslo himself denied it, calling Alaudinov directly), a nervous breakdown, blackmail from the Montyan-Grubnik circle, a preemptive attempt to build the image of a political victim ahead of a criminal case already in preparation. Pro-war commentator Yulia Vityazeva remarked, with barely concealed satisfaction: "He was certain that certain groups would support his manifesto — groups he'd been actively cultivating for the past six months. But they rushed to distance themselves."
Those "six months" and those "certain groups" are the key to everything.
Gref, Twenty-Four Hours Before
Twenty-four hours before Remeslo published his manifesto, German Gref was sitting in the Kremlin, briefing Putin on Sberbank's record profit: 1.706 trillion rubles for 2025. A third consecutive record. Dividends — 853 billion, also a record. On the surface: idyll. The technocrat at court, the court with its technocrat.
But this idyll has long been decorative.
To understand what actually happened, you have to look not at a lone blogger's post but at the map of alliances that had taken shape in Russia's elite by March 2026 — a map on which Gref occupies a position far more exposed than his balance sheet suggests.
Three Coalitions and One Technocrat
Russia's elite today is neither a monolith nor a choir. It is three coalitions in a state of slow-burning war over territory that will sooner or later come free.
The first — call them the "guardians" — is Shoigu, Bortnikov, Gromov, Vaino, Chemezov. The defense industry, the security services, media control, the administrative apparatus. The most powerful coalition right now, precisely because war is their natural habitat. But also their dead end: the only model of development they can offer is endless war and tightening the screws. No war — no indispensability.
The second — the "ideologist-condottieri" — is the Kovalchuks, Kiriyenko, Sechin, Zolotov. Their strength lies in the ideological superstructure, the personnel pipeline of "Leaders of Russia," the resources of Rosatom and the oil sector. Their weakness: key ally Patrushev has been weakened, and room for maneuver in the capitals is shrinking. Kiriyenko is expanding his footprint through control over the occupied territories and territorial defense — but that is a story of scarcity, not strength.
And then there is the third coalition — the "situational technocrats": Sobyanin, Mishustin, the Rotenbergs, Naryshkin, Medvedev. The brains and money of peacetime. Digital government, Moscow's budget, the economic bloc. The leading candidates for the role of "successors" in any scenario involving de-escalation — and the primary target for asset-stripping if the redistribution goes the other way. Their fatal weakness: no security resource of their own, and a complete inability to consolidate internally. Every man for himself.
Gref is the third coalition's chief technological and financial asset. Which automatically makes him the primary target of the first two.
Indispensable and Intolerable
His vulnerability is not new. In 2022, when Chubais was ejected from Rusnano without ceremony, analysts immediately noted that the "statists" had taken this as a signal that the liberal economic wing was out of favor — and that Gref was exposed. Putin publicly covered the banker — invited him to an AI conference, made the support visible. Balance restored.
But now is not then. Then, the war was just beginning. Now it is in its fifth year.
Gref was building an "ecosystem" — 110 million clients, an AI-native business model, a "human-centric company," a strategy extending to 2029. He was talking about digital statehood at a moment when the state was thinking about assaults. He was offering "governance through data" at a moment when others were offering governance through fear.
That made him simultaneously indispensable — and intolerable.
What the Remeslo Manifesto Actually Is
In his posts, Remeslo named Kiriyenko as the organizer of the provocation against Navalny. In his video messages, he said Putin would "lose power by 2026." Remeslo — who, in the words of FBK's lawyers, had been "part of Putin's vertical" since at least 2015 — suddenly began speaking a language that dismantled one coalition and quietly cleared space for another.
In Russia's system, coincidences of this caliber do not exist.
The manifesto deserves a close read. Every point in it is real. Every grievance is legitimate. The war is a catastrophe. The economy is bleeding out. The internet is being strangled. The palaces exist. All of it is true. But the most effective disinformation is not a lie. It is true facts in a false frame, delivered by the right person at a precisely chosen moment.
And here lies the operational core. Remeslo does not accuse Putin of invading Ukraine. He openly endorses the annexation of Crimea as a model. What Remeslo accuses Putin of is running the war incompetently. The charge is not aggression — it is the price of strategic failure at the outset. Putin is not bad because he started the war. He is bad because he didn't win it. This is not opposition. This is a demand for a more competent aggressor.
The Fifth Year and the Burning Horizon
Five years of war have devoured the resources of peacetime institutions. The economic bloc is rapidly losing autonomy under the pressure of military expenditure and sanctions. The war is not ending and is not being won in any sense that could be presented as victory. Elites who never gained access to defense contracts are growing restless. Putin is aging. There is no successor. The question of transition hangs suspended.
When a regime begins repainting its assets at this pace — when it cracks open preserves that were meant to stay on the shelf for years — it means one thing: the timeline has compressed. Something is already moving. Something that was not supposed to move this soon.
Gref with 1.7 trillion in profit is not a weak player. But a technocrat without an army, without a media resource, without his own security bloc is a player who can be expropriated at any convenient moment. That is precisely why his asset needed to be signaled publicly, through a proxy, in language the right recipients would read.
The Remeslo manifesto is not a symptom of the system's collapse. It is a sign of preparation for the next act. The speed of the costume change is not chaos. It is a regime that has already read the horizon and begun writing the script.
The personnel reshuffles will not be long in coming. And when the cards are finally dealt again, it will become clear that the game had been underway long before anyone noticed it had begun.