Russian authorities hit two anti-war voices on Friday with separate punishments, a fine that effectively ends one man’s political career and a pre-trial detention order for a blogger who dared to call Vladimir Putin a war criminal.
The cases show that the Kremlin’s tolerance for dissent, already close to zero, keeps getting lower as the war in Ukraine grinds through its fifth year.
Boris Nadezhdin, the 63-year-old former MP and anti-war politician who nearly managed to run for president in 2023 on a peace platform, was convicted of “displaying extremist symbols” over a reposted video showing Alexei Navalny’s image. The court fined him 1,000 roubles, roughly $13. The sum is trivial. The effect is not.
The conviction bars Nadezhdin from collecting the signatures needed to stand in September’s parliamentary elections. Nadezhdin has already been declared a “foreign agent” and barred from leaving Russia. He collapsed briefly in court, and said he could not pay the fine anyway because all his accounts had been frozen.
“Their real aim was to shut him up and stop him running for the Duma,” Nadezhdin said.
It worked.
Ilya Remeslo, a blogger who was a staunch Putin supporter until March 2026, took a harder fall. After publishing a post titled “Five reasons why I stopped supporting Vladimir Putin”, in which he called the president a “war criminal and thief” and demanded his resignation, Remeslo was sent to a psychiatric hospital for a month. On Friday, a court remanded him in custody for two months of pre-trial detention on charges of disseminating fake news about the military.
Before his arrest, Remeslo posted on Telegram that “the situation is getting worse rapidly for Putin,” citing fuel shortages and elite infighting. He may not have been wrong, but in today’s Russia, being right about Putin’s troubles is itself a crime.
The fuel shortages are real. Ukraine has targeted Russian oil refineries and storage depots across the country, and Putin admitted in June that the attacks had caused disruptions. Remeslo claimed that “everything is moving toward a situation where even a small push could lead to Putin losing power.”
That kind of talk is exactly what the Kremlin cannot afford to let circulate.
Few genuine opposition figures remain in Russia. Most have gone into exile. Navalny died in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024, which Russia attributed to natural causes, a claim the UK and four European countries have rejected, asserting he was poisoned. The remaining critics are picked off one by one, through fines, detention, or forced psychiatric hospitalization, leaving the political field empty of any organized alternative to Putin.
Putin’s approval ratings have slipped. Two major polls from mid-July show him at 66 percent (down 5 points in one week) and 65.1 percent, still high, but the lowest since February 2022. A small push might not topple a system built over 25 years. But the Kremlin is taking no chances, locking up anyone who might try.