Bonya and Remeslo: Two Petitions on the Same Sled. A Chronicle of the Kremlin’s April 2026 Special Operation

Where the scriptwriters stand, and the lighting crew, and the prop masters. And where, on cue, by the hour, by the minute, by the running order of scenes, in a single week compressed like a stick of dynamite, two leading roles step into the spotlight at once: the glamorous “petitioner” Viktoria Bonya and the half-mad “truth-teller” Ilya Remeslo. Coincidence? No. This is a score. This is synchronization. This is a special operation.

To understand what we are being shown, the chronology must first be reconstructed. Not the one served up by the official outlets, nor the one diligently but fragmentarily assembled by independent newsrooms, but a chronology stitched together with a single thread. Drawn through both parallel lines, that thread reveals one and the same canvas.

The Remeslo Line: A Holy Fool’s Mutiny, the Madhouse, and the Apparition of a Martyr

March 17, 2026, late evening. On the Telegram channel of Ilya Borisovich Remeslo — a 42-year-old St. Petersburg lawyer, former member of the Public Chamber, one of the most repulsive Kremlin informers of the past decade, the man who from 2017 to 2022 waged a personal war against Alexei Navalny and pushed the criminal case over “fraudulent” donations to the Anti-Corruption Foundation — a post appears under the brutally direct headline “Five reasons I have stopped supporting Vladimir Putin.” Meduza unpacks the story under the title “Blogger and informer Ilya Remeslo, who came out against Putin, ends up in a psychiatric hospital.”

This is not a slip, not a hack, not a hangover. Remeslo himself, calmly, in a shirt cut to resemble a military tunic, confirms his authorship in a video address. And he begins to enumerate: the war in Ukraine — “absolutely a dead end,” “waged for Putin’s complexes,” “with one to two million casualties”; the destruction of the economy; “the strangling of free media and the internet”; the unchanging power; the contempt for voters. A little later he adds a sixth point: “an insane, near-pathological taste for luxury” — with a nod to the palaces and yachts of “his friends from the ‘Ozero’ cooperative.” And he closes programmatically: “Vladimir Putin is not a legitimate president. He must resign and be tried as a war criminal and a thief.”

On March 18, Remeslo gives a long, two-hour interview to Alexander Plyushchev on the YouTube channel “The Breakfast Show” — the conversation is laid out in detail by Echo under the headline “Ilya Remeslo on his mutiny, the end of Putin’s power, and why he ‘crushed’ the Anti-Corruption Foundation.” He comes across as an entirely lucid man. He refuses to leave the country. He predicts that “Putin’s power will be gone before the year is out.” And, crucially, he confirms that from the mid-2010s until the end of 2025 he had been working for the Presidential Administration. First through Vyacheslav Volodin, then through Sergei Kiriyenko. His “projects” were personally signed off by Kiriyenko. His average monthly fee was 700,000 rubles. Seventy percent of the work concerned Navalny.

On March 19, Remeslo stops answering calls and disappears from social networks. By that evening it transpires that he has been hospitalized at St. Petersburg’s Skvortsov-Stepanov Psychiatric Hospital №3, in Ward 16 — “for men presenting with first-onset psychotic symptoms.” The medication: quetiapine and lithium, the standard heavy artillery for bipolar disorder. The chronology is confirmed by Meduza. The diagnosis, by Remeslo’s own account, was never shown to him — his explanations of how an ambulance “showed up on its own” appear in Novaya Gazeta’s account. He signed his consent to hospitalization retroactively. He spent exactly thirty days in the ward, until April 17. On the way out he wrote: “Harsh criticism of the highest officials of the state has its price — remember that.” And immediately he began demanding to be addressed as “the head of Russia’s opposition movement” — the metamorphosis is described by The Moscow Times under the suggestive title “Released from a psychiatric hospital after criticizing Putin, Z-blogger declares his intent to fight Putinism.”

This is the moment to pause and notice the strangeness. A 42-year-old operative of the Presidential Administration, embedded for twelve years in what Anti-Corruption Foundation lawyer Vyacheslav Gimadi called “Putin’s vertical,” a man with intimate knowledge of chains of command, of money flows, of correspondence and documents, the man who jailed Navalny and gutted “Smart Voting” — within thirty-six hours becomes a “war criminal’s” public accuser. And not a single criminal case. Not a single search. No Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code. Just a thirty-day rest in a ward of a St. Petersburg psychiatric hospital. And then a triumphal return.

The version put forward by “The Word for Defense,” a project close to Remeslo’s circle, is yawn-inducingly simple: a pre-investigation inquiry was supposedly opened against Remeslo over a domestic matter (embezzlement, some carve-up gone wrong), and he tried to convert it into a political persecution. To play the regime’s victim. Even this version makes Remeslo “one of theirs.” But it does not explain why he was released. And, above all, it does not explain why on April 27 he sits down in front of Ksenia Anatolievna Sobchak’s camera.

The Bonya Line: A Petition from Monaco and Tears of Gratitude

April 14, 2026 — exactly a week after Remeslo has already spent a month “being treated” in Skvortsov-Stepanov — Viktoria Anatolievna Bonya, a 46-year-old former cast member of “Dom-2,” a model, a “lifestyle blogger,” a mountaineer with thirteen million Instagram followers, sixteen years a resident of Monaco with her daughter from the Irish billionaire Alex Smurfit (heir to the Smurfit Kappa Group paper empire), records on Instagram an eighteen-minute video address to the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. The address is thoroughly dissected by Meduza in the piece “‘The people are afraid of you.’ Viktoria Bonya records an address to Vladimir Putin.”

The video is meticulously calibrated. Bonya — “speaking for the people.” Bonya — “not an opposition figure.” Bonya — “a supporter of the president.” Bonya — “not afraid.” But everyone else, without exception, fears Putin: “bloggers, artists, governors.” Between Putin and the people stands “a wall,” because “they don’t tell you anything.” And five precisely chosen “petition” points are listed: the flooding in Dagestan, the fuel oil on the beaches of Anapa, the mass slaughter of livestock in Novosibirsk Oblast, the killing of Red-Book endangered animals, and the blocking of the internet and messengers. All of them resonant. All of them about the boyars, never about the tsar. The finale: a proposal to create a platform for direct appeals to the president “in Max or VKontakte.”

Within twenty-four hours the video racks up a million likes. By the end of the week — 28.5 million views and 1.5 million likes. More than Putin’s “direct line” pulls in. Bonya’s reaction to the Kremlin’s response — tears of gratitude addressed personally to Dmitry Sergeyevich Peskov — was captured by Current Time. The very same day, April 14, an analogous appeal — eight minutes long, headlined “We’re out of the strength to fear you” — is uploaded by Aiza, the ex-wife of the rapper Guf, a TV host with four million followers. The same rhetoric, the same script: “they aren’t getting through to Putin,” “corruption,” “the poverty of the people.” The synchronized second salvo is analyzed by Dialog.UA. A collective petition. A rehearsed chorus.

On April 16, Dmitry Sergeyevich Peskov, the Kremlin’s press secretary — the “court holy fool,” as I’d call him — replies softly, gently, kindly: “Of course, we have seen it. Resonant subjects. Major work is under way on them, with a great many people involved.” That is enough for Bonya to record a new clip — in tears, breathless with happiness, thanking Dmitry Sergeyevich personally. And immediately to refuse interviews to Dozhd, The Insider, Yury Dud, the BBC. “I’m not with you. I’m inside the people.” A day later, on April 17, Aiza unexpectedly deletes her video. The deletion is reported by Meduza. On April 17, Peskov explains that he sees no point in further “discussion.” A Meduza source inside a pro-Kremlin outlet reports that the Presidential Administration’s political bloc has issued an “urgent request not to develop the Bonya theme.” And here is where it gets interesting.

Solovyov Throws It in Reverse: The First False Note

While Peskov plays pastoral, on the federal channel “Russia 1” Vladimir Rudolfovich Solovyov — the Kremlin’s chief vocal son — in his evening show on April 15 and his morning show on April 16, opens fire on Bonya with heavy obscenities: “battered slut,” “she shouldn’t open her filthy mouth,” “foreign agent, scumbag, traitor to the Motherland.” Solovyov is reinforced by State Duma deputy Vitaly Milonov with his “Dubai escort” line. The designer Artemy Lebedev pitches in with his bons mots. The detailed chronology of this denunciation, and the reactions to it, are logged by Radio Liberty in a piece with the telling headline “Solovyov is disgracing the president.” These are the boyars’ “house holy fools,” fully consistent with the classic logic of “letting off steam”: their job is not to refute the petitioner on the merits but to redirect the people’s attention away from content (the fuel oil, the cattle, the internet) and toward the personality of the blogger. To crush the irritant. To turn a conversation about power into a conversation about the size of a neckline.

But on April 18 Bonya releases a clip processed through neural networks — cast as Spider-Man, she defeats Solovyov, Milonov, and Lebedev. And announces that she is preparing a class action “on behalf of all the women of the country.” On April 21 — and this is the key date — Ksenia Anatolievna Sobchak enters the play: she files a complaint with the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, addressed to Alexander Bastrykin, demanding a legal assessment of Solovyov’s words. The filing is reported by Rambler News. The full chronology of the “feud” is also presented by Fontanka. The next day, suddenly, the federal media regulator Roskomnadzor opens an inspection of Russia 1 — allegedly on the basis of a viewer’s complaint — over the insults to Bonya and the absence of an age rating. The inspection is confirmed by Meduza.

And here Solovyov throws the gear into reverse. On April 28, live on “Solovyov Live,” in a so-called “debate” with Bonya, the Kremlin’s chief attack dog — the man whose voice has never trembled when insulting the dead, when reviling the living, when blaspheming Italy’s prime minister Meloni — suddenly, with a meaty smile, says to the blogger: “You look wonderful. I was too emotional. I have to apologize. You’re absolutely right.” And then, “as a peace offering,” he proposes to jointly create a “platform for citizens’ appeals.” In other words, the very platform that Bonya had proposed in her April 14 address.

This is precisely the “pathetic reverse” I mentioned. Solovyov never apologizes to anyone. Ever. Except in those cases when a brief call comes down from the highest tier of the Kremlin pyramid: “Volodya, knock it off.” Which, incidentally, he himself practically confirms on air with Bonya: it turns out he was triggered not by the blogger herself but by the fact “that your address was noticed at that level.” That is, the loyal hound charged in full bay — and then was yanked back by his collar. And he lay down.

This means one thing. Behind Bonya stands neither Dozhd nor Dud. Behind Bonya stands the top. Not the very top, but close to it. And the top, in this play, is a player.

Remeslo Sits Down with Sobchak: The Point of Assembly

And now, April 27. Ten days after Remeslo’s release from hospital. Thirteen days after Bonya’s petition. Six days after Sobchak’s filing with the Investigative Committee. On the YouTube channel “Ostorozhno: Sobchak” (more than three million subscribers) drops a two-hour interview between Ksenia Anatolievna and Ilya Borisovich. A detailed reading of the interview is provided by Radio Liberty under the title “Blogger-informer Remeslo gives his first post-psychiatric-hospital interview”; a parallel reading is offered by Meduza; the Ukrainian focus is in Focus, under the headline “They ‘secretly hate’ Putin and will soon overthrow him: a former Kremlin propagandist gives an interview to Sobchak”; the bare fact of the recording is in Verstka.

And Remeslo begins to speak. What was forbidden in the Bonya line is permitted in the Sobchak line. Here the tsar is not “good” — here the tsar is the root of all evils. Verbatim: “The principal cause of all the problems in our country is neither Kiriyenko, nor the Max messenger, nor the Presidential Administration, but the man who sits at the very top, who runs all of this. That is Vladimir Putin.” The central line is recorded by OstroV. And then: “the security services hate Putin because he has taken everything from them,” “people in the Presidential Administration and in the government secretly hate him because they cannot enjoy their wealth thanks to the confiscations under the Prosecutor General’s lawsuits.” And then: a forecast of “a quiet palace coup at the end of 2026 to the beginning of 2027,” with reference to “system people such as Gennady Zyuganov.” And then: the floated name of the future “successor” — Mikhail Mishustin. And then: the admission of an eight-million-ruble fee “through the structures of Konstantin Kostin” (former head of the Domestic Policy Directorate of the Presidential Administration). And then: the self-recommendation — “head of Russia’s opposition movement.”

Note: this is uttered by a man who has spent a month in a state psychiatric hospital, dosed with lithium and quetiapine. A man whom no one has crossed off the list of the living. A man at whose home an “ambulance accompanied by police” arrived to tell him, verbatim: “Your texts about Putin are stirring up society.” Then they let him out. Then they handed the microphone to the daughter of Petersburg’s first mayor, once Putin’s own teacher.

Sobchak, to her credit, makes several attempts in the conversation to step out of her assigned role. She asks Remeslo a direct question: “Wasn’t your March mutiny part of the authorities’ plan?” Remeslo answers evasively: “There was a plan, but I did not coordinate it with anyone. The point will become clear only after certain events.” Which events, he does not specify.

The Pieces on the Board: Who Stands Behind Whom

To understand what we’re being shown, we have to look at who’s on the other side of the stage. Without moralism and without illusions.

Viktoria Bonya. The daughter of a coal miner from Krasnokamensk, a former waitress, a graduate of the Institute of the Food Industry, a graduate of the “Dom-2” academy of Akselrod and Sobchak, sixteen years a resident of Monaco. From 2010 to 2017 — the common-law wife of Alex Smurfit, heir to the Irish-British paper empire. Their daughter is a citizen of Monaco. The biographical background is thoroughly assembled at My.UA. A COVID-era conspiracy theorist — it was Bonya in 2020 who told millions that 5G was irradiating the population, that Gates was preparing chip implants, that the virus was a “secret world government” operation. That COVID past is logged by TJournal. In 2020 she admitted to the Russian phone-prankers Vovan and Lexus that she was prepared, for money, to speak out against the constitutional amendments in the Russian Federation — i.e., she sells. From 2022 onward she has consistently demonstrated support for the war: by her own account she has donated to “Kursk, the LPR, and the DPR.” A detailed portrait of Bonya as the regime’s “collective unconscious” was drawn for The Insider by Kirill Morozov. An additional layer of analysis is available at Charter97. As of 2026, she has thirteen million Instagram followers. Her April 14 address is not her first salvo: in the same month she had asked for the Chekalin verdict to be reviewed, defended Novosibirsk farmers, and scolded Milonov. Bonya is the female face of an apolitical mass. The ideal medium: she has accepted every imperial talking point (the war, Crimea, anti-Westernism), while preserving the image of “one of us” — a simple woman who gave birth to a child and earned her yacht. The “elders of Bonya” are not the Smurfits. The elders of Bonya are those who write her script and clear her green corridor: the same people who, with one short phone call, can stop Solovyov in mid-broadcast. A parallel reading of the “Bonya plus Aiza” operation as the “first cracks in Putin’s system” was proposed by Bild and retold by Hvylya.

Ilya Remeslo. A lawyer with a “Beautiful Russia of the Future” trademark filing (registered in 2024 to spite the Anti-Corruption Foundation), the author of the campaigns “Navalny is a thief” and the assaults on Smart Voting, a graduate of the Kremlin school of the Volodin-Kiriyenko generation, the man through whom Konstantin Kostin (former head of the Domestic Policy Directorate of the Presidential Administration, later head of the Civil Society Development Foundation) laundered, by his own admission, millions of rubles. His family works in psychiatry (the father, the sister). Until 2026, he was a “house holy fool” in the same artel as Solovyov. By his own admission in the Plyushchev and Sobchak interviews, his “projects” against the opposition were personally signed off by Kiriyenko. He claims he began “thinking critically about Putin” after Prigozhin’s mutiny in June 2023 — a convenient dating, in the spirit of the Prigozhin fronde. His role in the April play is to act as a bridge. Between the Z-segment, the ultra-patriots, the front-line malcontents, those fed up with “Kiriyenko and Max,” and Sobchak’s liberal audience. A mad truth-teller emerging from the asylum with the slogan “the tsar to the dock” — the perfect channel for a leak.

Ksenia Sobchak. The daughter of the first mayor of Saint Petersburg, Anatoly Alexandrovich Sobchak, for whom Vladimir Putin worked from 1990 to 1996 as assistant, deputy, “right hand.” Anatoly Sobchak died on the night of February 19–20, 2000, in the Rus hotel in Svetlogorsk, six days after becoming Putin’s official campaign proxy in the presidential election. Anatoly Sobchak’s biography, including the circumstances of his death, is laid out by Rambler. The official version: acute heart failure. In May 2000 the prosecutor’s office of Kaliningrad Oblast opened a criminal case under the article “Premeditated murder.” The case was closed on August 4, 2000. The Paris-based writer Arkady Vaksberg, in his book “Toxic Politics,” laid out in detail the version of a targeted poisoning — through a Soviet/Russian special services “poison laboratory,” through one of those very substances later used to poison Litvinenko, Perepilichny, the Skripals, Kara-Murza, and Navalny. The witness to Sobchak’s death, the businessman Shabtai Kalmanovich, was shot dead in Moscow in 2009. No other living “first-hand” witnesses remain in the public record. Ksenia’s mother, Lyudmila Narusova, is a senator — the lifetime keeper of the thin thread between Ksenia and the Kremlin. Her husband is the director Konstantin Bogomolov, who until recently was a candidate for rector of the Moscow Art Theatre School — a man whom the press places in “the Kovalchuk circle” and the “patriotic wing.” Her former husband is Maxim Vitorgan. Ksenia is the owner of the holding “Ostorozhno Media,” the author of the “Ostorozhno: Sobchak” channel with three million subscribers, a former presidential candidate “against all” (1.68 percent in 2018), the former leader of “The Mistresses,” a recurring figure in extortion cases. Her current media profile and the sheer density of her appearances in the field can be tracked through Lenta.RU. My hypothesis, as the author of this piece: Ksenia knows — or suspects — who killed her father. She has lived for twenty-six years inside a system that, as her well-grounded intuition tells her, cut short the life of the central man of her childhood. She hates. And that hatred is an asset the Kremlin knows how to convert. Sobchak is the perfect “controlled opponent,” precisely because part of her rage is real. She is brought onto the stage whenever an “opposition that overthrows no one” is needed. In April 2026 — exactly so.

The Calendar: Why Now

To grasp the meaning of the synchronization, look at the calendar and the context of late April 2026 — the surface onto which both plots have been overlaid.

The war goes on. Trump is conducting, in his words, “constructive negotiations” with Putin and Zelensky simultaneously. Since the autumn of 2025, a peace plan has lain on the table — one that proposes Ukraine cede the Donbas. On April 25, Zelensky declares his readiness for trilateral talks in Azerbaijan. Erdogan stands ready to mediate. Everyone understands that by the parade days of May, there will either be a fixed ceasefire (which the Kremlin will want to sell as a victory) or a new escalation (which the Kremlin will be forced to explain).

The budget is on fire. According to the Russian Finance Ministry, the federal budget deficit for the first quarter of 2026 stands at 4.576 trillion rubles. That is 800 billion above the figure planned for the entire year. Oil and gas revenues have collapsed by 45 percent. Overdue receivables in the economy have hit 7.7 trillion. Minister Reshetnikov publicly admits: “the resources are exhausted.” Professor Zubareva speaks of the fifth crisis in twenty-five years. The figures are detailed by V1.ru in the piece “Why Russia’s budget slid into deficit faster than expected.” A thorough analysis of the business response is at 74.ru. The general state of the “great crisis” of 2026 is at Mentoday. Tax hikes and a sequester are on the agenda. Social discontent is piling up.

The internet is collapsing. From February 10, Roskomnadzor has been officially throttling Telegram. From February 11, WhatsApp has been completely blocked. By the end of March, Telegram availability dropped to 30 percent. The state messenger Max — imposed on schools, government agencies, and apartment-block chats — keeps “falling over”: on March 30, on April 1, on April 25. The crashes are reported by The Moscow Times. The population, especially the young, is fed up — a Russian Field poll retold in Meduza (“Total chaos, basically”) puts dissatisfaction at 83 percent. A comparative map of messengers in 2026 Russia is available at Appvisor. This is one of the principal triggers behind Bonya’s address.

The cattle are being slaughtered. From March 2026, in Novosibirsk, Buryatia, and Altai Krai, a mass forced cull of cows and pigs is under way. The authorities cite pasteurellosis and rabies, but the farmers suspect foot-and-mouth disease. There are protests, road blockades, journalists detained. Those protests are covered by Siberia.Realities in the piece “‘Let them burn us too.’ Protests against the mass destruction of livestock in Siberia continue.” This is the second major trigger.

The oligarchs are being stripped. Since 2024–2025, a wave of “nationalizations” is under way through the Prosecutor General’s lawsuits: STS Corporation (Bikov and Bobrov, the former adviser to Chubais), Vice-Governor Chemezov, the assets of Merkushkin, hotels, factories. The volume of seizures in 2025–3.1 trillion rubles, four and a half times the figure for 2024. The Bikov-Bobrov case is covered by NEWS.ru; the Chemezov file is analyzed in Izvestia. The old “family” is shrinking. This is precisely what Remeslo, in the Sobchak interview, hints at when he speaks of “the secret hatred of the Presidential Administration and the government.”

The towers are quarrelling. According to publications by The Bell, Corriere della Sera, the analysis of Kirill Rogov, and the work of Tatyana Stanovaya, the FSB — specifically its Second Service — has, under Bortnikov, gained new wartime powers and is effectively squeezing out of the information space the political bloc of Kiriyenko and the information bloc of Gromov. The picture of “the war of the two clans” inside Putin’s circle is described in detail by Dialog.UA; a parallel analysis is on Kyiv’s TV channel 24. Chemezov was dismissed on September 15, 2025. On April 21, 2026, Mikhail Zygar publishes a piece on the conflict between Kiriyenko and the Defense Minister Belousov over the “United Russia” parliamentary lists: Kiriyenko does not want self-nominated military men in the Duma; he remembers Prigozhin. Kiriyenko is weakening. According to the Kyiv analyst Oleksandr Demchenko and the Petersburg observer Kirill Morozov in The Insider, Bonya is Kiriyenko’s countermove against the Lubyanka offensive. “A wounded bird of the regime.”

Zemtsov is staging a suicide. On April 15–16, the Z-blogger and military pilot Alexei Zemtsov (“Voevoda”) publishes “suicide note” videos with compromising material on the deputy commander of the Aerospace Forces, Kravchenko, demanding recognition of “the army’s disgrace.” Details — in Meduza and in Dialog.UA. On April 16, it emerges that he is alive — the propagandists’ reaction to Zemtsov’s “leak” is also at Dialog.UA. This is a signal from the Z-segment.

May 9 — the Victory Day parade, with Fico, Dodik, and guests from Central Asia expected. The preparations are described by URA.RU and News.ru; a general chronicle of cancellations and confirmations is at Pravda-TV. Tribunes are being assembled on Red Square.

All of these lines are fuel. The Bonya-Remeslo special operation is the spark, aimed at a specific point.

The Technology: How the Operation Works

The first device, a classic since the days of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich: “The Good Tsar, the Wicked Boyars.” Bonya formats her petition in exactly that mold. We love Putin. Putin doesn’t know. The boyars are the saboteurs. Give us a platform — and the tsar will hear us. The formula, parsed inter alia in the Echo column “Bonya draws the tsar into his subjects’ affairs” and in the analyses of Abbas Gallyamov and Tatyana Stanovaya (see the Bonya portrait at amic.ru), comes at a price. On the one hand, it channels protest into a safe duct (not into the streets, but into the comments). On the other hand — and Gallyamov is absolutely right — it draws the tsar into the affairs of his subjects, affairs he does not want to deal with. That is, it pins responsibility for the fuel oil, the cattle, the internet, the slaughter — onto Putin personally. Which, as 1905 demonstrated, is a risky move. But if the operation is run by professionals, the steam is released, the rating ticks up a hair (“he heard us!”), and then comes stabilization. The yard-keepers have swept up. Peskov, on April 17, has already said: “I see no point in further discussion.” Translation: subject closed, go home.

The second device: “Pseudo-opposition as a relief valve.” Sobchak-Remeslo. Here a different register is at work — liberal, urban, “all-understanding.” Here you can say anything about Putin. Here you can even name a successor (Mishustin). Here you can install a Remeslo-led version of the Anti-Corruption Foundation. The aim is to channel into a safe duct not the apolitical mothers but the intelligentsia, what is left of the urban middle class, the opposition figures who haven’t yet emigrated. And, critically, to intercept the Z-segment — that part of the pro-war population disappointed in Kiriyenko, in Max, in the high command, in the course of the war. Remeslo, the former “house holy fool,” is the ideal bridge: he is “one of theirs” for the Z-crowd and at the same time an “accuser” of Putin. He has spoken to them in their own language about their pain, and has handed them the name Mishustin as a “quiet” exit. That is the meaning of the “project.”

The third device, operational: “the burnt source.” Remeslo knows everything: chains of command, names, money transfers, “talking-point memos,” the Volodin-Navalny deal over the 2013 Moscow mayoral election, Kostin’s lobbying, the denunciation schemes. If he had truly “gone off the rails,” they would not have been treating him in a hospital. They would have killed him. Simply, no alternatives. The fact that he is alive, free, and producing his own YouTube channel means that he was not burned but resold. From a Kiriyenko informer to a Kiriyenko informer — just now under the cover of an “opposition figure.” Everything he says on air is preapproved: he may speak about Volodin (long out of the game), about Kiriyenko (under pressure), about Kostin (a played card); he may not speak about active security service chiefs, about Bortnikov, about Patrushev, about the real financial flows of the war. The attentive reader will notice that on the money of the war, on the offshore accounts of Timchenko, on the palaces of the Rotenbergs, on the transfers to Roldugin, Remeslo says nothing new. Leonid Volkov of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, commenting to Meduza, put it precisely: “Remeslo will speak truly when he begins naming names, dates, chains of command, money, correspondence, documents.” For now, he is not. Which means he has not been told to.

The fourth device, historical: “Kurbsky in Lithuania.” Ivan the Terrible, having released Prince Kurbsky abroad, used him simultaneously as a propaganda exhibit and as a controlled leak. The Kremlin has been working this trick since the 1990s: Berezovsky, Gusinsky, Nevzlin, Kasyanov — each, in his time, turned out to be “opposition with a flavor of.” Surkov’s genius of “managed democracy” lay in keeping the opposition always in the “right shape,” so that protest dissipated into figurines rather than into the streets. Bonya and Remeslo are the reincarnation of the same technology, only in a new narrative wrapper. Glamour and holy foolery. A purely Russian combination.

The Call to Action: What We Are Being Told to Do

Bonya tells the women: record a video, hit “like,” cry, believe that the tsar “has heard.” In other words: stay home. Vote in the September 2026 Duma elections. Subscribe to Max. Hand Putin legitimacy via “feedback.”

Remeslo tells the intelligentsia and the Z-fronde: wait for the palace coup. Don’t do anything yourselves. Don’t go out into the streets — “others will.” Recognize Mishustin when he appears. If you are unhappy with Putin — here is a “leader of the opposition with a diagnosis.” If you are a serviceman — here is your hope: they “secretly hate” him in the Presidential Administration, the security services “are waiting for stability.” Don’t desert. Don’t rebel. Wait.

Sobchak says: I am your voice. I am at war with Solovyov, I have filed against him with the Investigative Committee, I give the microphone to a former informer. I am the “good rights advocate.”

Solovyov says: I am bad, I am crude, I have apologized. The authorities see that I have gone too far and they put me in my place. The authorities are just.

Peskov says: the tsar hears everything. Go home.

Sum total: an ideal adaptive propaganda. Every audience segment receives its own usher. Every disgruntled person — a mirror.

What Is It All For: A Tactical Forecast for May-June 2026

And here begins the most important part. If you have understood that the April play is a special operation, the question to answer is: what is being prepared behind this curtain of noise?

I bet on four possible decisions that demand precisely now, in the “window” of the May holidays and through the end of June, a covering of public attention.

The first and most probable: a fixed ceasefire with Ukraine on terms of partial Kremlin recognition of Trump’s “red lines” — in exchange for the lifting of sanctions on a portion of assets and the legitimization of the annexations. To pull this off, Putin needs the staging of a “victory” by May 9 and quiet on the streets of Russian cities at the moment when he is “selling” to his own population the line that Donbas was taken, and Kherson, after all, was “not really wanted.” The Bonya-and-Remeslo riot is the perfect distraction. The population watches the blogger and Solovyov “have it out,” instead of asking why the mobilization has been halted and why the “new regions” have not been returned.

Second: a new wave of taxes and a sequester. The budget, as we have seen, has been blown by 4.5 trillion in the first quarter. The Finance Ministry is already hinting at a hike in VAT, in excises, in the recycling fee. Reshetnikov — at the need for “systemic decisions.” This is a blow to the middle class, to business, to the contractors of the military-industrial complex. To prevent a coordinated protest, the discontent must be sprayed across vivid private storylines — misogynists, sluts, psychiatric wards, AI clips with Spider-Man. It works.

Third: the final closure of Telegram and the cleanup of the internet. A full block, according to RBC and The Bell, was being prepared for April 1 — and was postponed. Most likely — precisely for the sake of controlling the protest wave (including the one amplified by Bonya). The Kremlin is waiting for the moment when Telegram’s drop to zero can be wrapped in the narrative “look, the tsar heard us, fixed it, things are stable now.” May-June is the window for that decision. Substitute products are appearing: Max, VK, domestic clones.

Fourth, and most ominous: the preparation of a “quiet transition” within the elite. The very thing Remeslo announced on camera. Confiscations of “family” oligarchs’ assets (Bikov, Bobrov, Chemezov — and that is only the start), the strengthening of the FSB’s positions and Belousov’s “patriotic” wing, the weakening of Kiriyenko, the squeezing-out of Gromov, the redistribution of media. Remeslo’s words about “a coup by late 2026 to early 2027” should not be read literally. But they should be read as a signal: someone inside the pyramid is testing the ground. Possibly, those slated for the transit. Possibly, Mishustin. Possibly, the Kovalchuks. Possibly, Putin himself, calculating how, at seventy, to hand over power without repeating the fates of Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko.

Trigger events worth watching closely over the next four to eight weeks:

• any “terrorist attacks,” “assassination attempts,” or “accidents” in the immediate circle of the first man. In the April logic — against Kiriyenko, against Gromov, or, conversely, against representatives of the security bloc. Any such incident will be the “event” Remeslo has already hinted at: “the point of the plan will become clear after certain events”;
• the sudden dismissal of one of the boyars — a major regional governor, a minister, a deputy head of the Presidential Administration — under a criminal case. With high probability from the Kiriyenko circle (Yarin, Kharichev, Gromov). That will be the signal: “the tsar has heard Bonya”;
• the announcement of a partial second wave of mobilization — under cover of “ceasefire,” “rotation,” or “contract”;
• a symbolic amnesty for one or two political-prisoner-bloggers, or, conversely, a demonstrative sentencing — so that Bonya can “weep over justice,” and Sobchak can “win”;
• a mass media wave featuring Remeslo. His first interview with Sobchak is only the ranging shot. Next — appearances on the YouTube channels of Kolezev, Dud (if he deigns), Gordon, Nevzorov. Each subsequent interview will contain a portion of controlled “leak,” always in the direction useful to the current handler;
• the appearance of “new faces”: Aiza was a trial balloon. Expect, in May-June, two or three more million-follower bloggers to join the appeals to Putin “on behalf of the people” (Ida Galich, Ekaterina Gordon, Anastasia Ivleeva are candidates);
• new “nationalizations” of property under the Prosecutor General’s lawsuits. Remeslo explicitly named this motif as “the source of hatred for Putin” inside the elite. Expect acceleration and an expansion of the list;
• a possible escalation in Tuapse, Anapa, Krasnodar Krai — oil refineries are already burning there, drone strikes are coming in. The scenario of a “terrorist attack” in one of the coastal cities, followed by a tightening of the regime inside Russia, fits the logic of the transit;
• and finally, the main one: Ksenia Anatolievna Sobchak’s emergence onto a new electoral playing field. The “Sobchak as the savior of women and the insulted” scenario is already unfolding. By September 2026, in the Duma campaign, she may be promoted as the umbrella “face of constructive opposition” — under cover of her grievance against Solovyov, under the wing of her senator-mother, under the protection of her system-director husband. This will close the circle opened on April 21 with the Investigative Committee filing.

Coda: Kurbsky on the Line with Ivan the Terrible

I wrote in “The Russian Myth” and in “The Myths of the Third Rome”: the principal technology of Russian autocracy is not repression but adaptation. Not “ban everything” but “lead everything.” Not to silence the voice but to hire it. Not to shoot the petitioner on the Palace Square but to seat Solovyov beside him — the same Solovyov who will deliver an apology tomorrow. Kurbsky, corresponding with Ivan the Terrible from Lithuania, never understood, until the end of his life, that half of his correspondence had been written to the tsar’s tune. And we, reading in April 2026 the weeping Bonya seeing in the Kremlin “major work being done,” and listening to Remeslo promising a “quiet coup,” are obliged to recognize, in this correspondence, the same tune.

Bonya is not the voice of the people. She is a hired microphone, run all the way to the most distant wooden hut and plugged into the Kremlin amplifier. Remeslo is not a truth-teller. He is a burnt, retempered, and re-released operative of the Presidential Administration. Sobchak is not the opposition. She is a professional channel of sublimation, the daughter of Anatoly Sobchak, who may indeed suspect who killed her father, yet has lived for twenty-six years inside the system that the suspected killer leads. Solovyov is not a hound off the leash. He is a hound on a leash; the leash was tugged, the hound sat down. Peskov is not a “court holy fool by the tsar.” He is the audio engineer at the mixing desk.

They are all actors in one play. The play is called “The Holding Pattern.” The plot is to keep Russia in its apathetic hypnosis for another six months to a year, while inside the pyramid they decide who hands the levers to whom, who topples whom, who becomes the formal heir, who stays in the shadows. On the outside — the war, the negotiations, the budgetary abyss, the cattle slaughter, the blocked internet. On the inside — two bloggers, one informer, one TV host, and a single tear before the camera. And twenty-eight million views in which all the noise of the real has drowned.

The attentive observer must do one thing: look where they are not pointing. Listen to the silences between Bonya’s words. Watch those who say “Volodin” instead of “Bortnikov.” Count the days between March 17 and May 9. And remember that the Russian imperial myth is not eternal. It breaks at the precise moment the petitioner understands that the tsar is the boyars. And that writing to him is the same as writing to oneself, on one’s own gravestone.

Bonya does not understand this. Remeslo pretends not to. Sobchak, I think, understands — but stays silent, because she has scores to settle, a mother who is a senator, and a husband who is a director. We are obliged to understand. That, after all, is why this article is being written.

For us in Kyiv, watching from this side of the front, the lesson is simpler still. Russia’s regime, even when it cracks, does not crack toward us. It cracks toward itself — toward another iteration of itself. Our security cannot be staked on a Kremlin coup that the Kremlin itself stages. It can only be staked on what we ourselves build.

Until the next installment. It will come in May