Russian opposition activist Ildar Dadin was killed while fighting for Ukraine

Ildar Dadin, a prominent Russian opposition activist fighting in Ukraine on the side of Kyiv, was killed while competing, according to the group that recruited him.

A spokesman for that group, the Civilian Council, told the BBC that Dadin had died, adding that “he is dead and still a hero”.

The activist-turned-soldier was killed when soldiers from his volunteer battalion, the Russian Free Corps, came under Russian artillery fire in the Kharkiv region of northeastern Ukraine.

At this time, there are no further details and the Legion itself would not comment while saying a military operation is still ongoing.

But Ilia Ponamarev, an exiled Russian opposition politician with previous links to the Legion, told the BBC he was “certain, alas” that Dadin was dead.

Another source clarified that this “was confirmed by those who fought with him”.

The latest messages I sent to his phone are still marked as “unread”.

Ildar Dadin became became known in Russia a decade ago for its persistence in organizing peaceful protests as political repression there increased.

He was the first person to be prosecuted under the new Article 212.1 – quickly dubbed the Dadin Law – which in 2014 made it a criminal offense to repeat violations of Russia’s increasingly restrictive protest regulations.

In his case, that simply meant standing on the streets of Moscow with a banner.

Sentenced to two and a half years, Dadin was put in a prison cell and immediately went on a hunger strike. Then, his prison guards tortured him to force him to stop.

Shortly after his release in 2017, I met him in Moscow and he described being hung from a wall by his handcuffed wrists. The guards then threatened him with rape. He admitted that the brutality almost broke him.

So when I heard that Dadin had joined a battalion of Russian volunteers fighting for Ukraine, I got in touch again, and earlier this year we had a series of long conversations.

“I could not sit still and do nothing to become an accomplice to Russia’s evil, to its crimes,” Dadin explained his decision to register, as principled and intense as I remembered him that.

He has always considered himself a pacifist but now lists his reasons for taking up arms: “Invasion, mass murder, torture, rape and pillage.” However, he still chose the nickname Gandhi.

Dadin felt deeply that he was personally responsible for Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor.

He argued that he and the Russians failed to stop Vladimir Putin, leaving them afraid to go out in the face of police violence and the threat of prison.

“The important thing now is to act according to your conscience,” Dadin wrote to me one night near the front lines in Sumy.

He initially signed up with the Siberian Battalion in June 2023 before transferring to the Russian Free Corps last winter – both are officially part of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

The recruits were mainly Russian citizens who hoped that helping Ukraine defeat Vladimir Putin would be the first step toward ending his rule in the Kremlin.

Their numbers as well as the effectiveness of their fighting force are unclear.

They have had some successes, including a cross-border incursion into Russia earlier this year around the time Putin was re-elected.

But for Dadin, the experience wasn’t quite what he expected.

He felt that some of the missions his unit was sent on were militarily “pointless.”

He described a battle in which he ended up pinned down for eight hours by Russian fire in a bomb crater, with a drone trying to drop grenades on him, while a man Fellow volunteer soldiers bled to death.

And like many Ukrainian soldiers, he was exhausted, fighting almost without a day off and limping because of a wound in his hip.

I wondered if he could leave, but Dadin clearly understood that his conscience would not allow him to sit “on the sidelines”.

Not while Ukrainians are being killed, as he puts it, “by Russian criminals”.

“I tried to stop Russia – but could I? No,” he scolded himself during one of our last conversations. “And thousands of people died because I didn’t do enough.”

Those who sent him to fight did not agree. “Ildar is strong, brave, principled and honest,” the Civilian Council wrote. “That’s how we should remember him.”