Informer Ilya Remeslo told how he initiated a lawsuit against Alexei Navalny by a pensioner

Pensioner Mikhail Kostenko, who was suing Alexei Navalny over a donation, sent money to the politician in agreement with blogger-informer Ilya Remeslo. Craft himself spoke about this in an interview with Ksenia Sobchak, which he gave after forced hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital.

According to the blogger, he offered Kostenko about 50 thousand rubles for the pensioner to donate the same amount to Alexei Navalny, and then demanded that it be recognized as fraud: Kostenko claimed in his lawsuit that he first transferred the money to the oppositionist, and then found out about his criminal record. The idea, Remeslo explained, was to gain access to the oppositionist’s account statements through the court and prove that he spent donations from supporters on his personal needs.

The Savyolovsky District Court of Moscow considered Kostenko’s claim in 2017. According to Remeslo, he agreed with the pensioner only on a civil claim. However, five years later, in 2022, when Navalny was already in IK-2 in Pokrov, the security forces opened a criminal case for fraud, alleging that the politician used “for personal purposes” money transferred from FBK or for his election campaign. Kostenko was one of four victims.

“It all turned out that these idiots from the Investigative Committee attracted this man and decided to make him a victim. To which I said, are you crazy? He is completely unprepared to testify, you will have huge problems in court. They said: management told us so, we don’t know anything,” Remeslo recalls.

As a result, speaking in court via video link, Kostenko said that he had no claims against Alexei Navalny, and Remeslo wrote the statement for him. Now the blogger claims that it was not even he who did this, but the investigator.

As a result, the court found Navalny guilty, including in the episode with Kostenko.

Two years after the verdict, the politician died in prison as a result of poisoning.

The informer Ilya Remeslo, known for his attacks on the oppositionist, “was hoping until the very end that he would be pulled out and exchanged,” he said in an interview with Sobchak.

In March, Remeslo published several posts sharply criticizing Putin and the war, and soon after was hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital.