Ildar Dadin, a well-known Russian opposition activist fighting in Ukraine on Kiev’s side, was killed in action, according to the party that recruited him.
A spokesman for that group, the Civic Council, told the BBC that Dadin had died, adding that “he was, and remains, a hero.”
The activist-turned-fighter was slain when men from his volunteer battalion, the Freedom of Russia Legion, were targeted by Russian artillery in the Kharkiv region of northeastern Ukraine.
For the time being, no additional information is available, and the Legion will not comment while a military action is ongoing.
However, Ilia Ponamarev, an exiled Russian opposition figure with historical links to the Legion, has told the BBC that Dadin is “certainly, alas,” dead.
Another account added that this was “confirmed by those who were with him in battle.”.
The most recent messages I sent to his phone are still marked “unread.”.
Ildar Dadin rose to prominence in Russia a decade ago for his persistence in organising peaceful protests despite increased political repression.
He was the first person charged under a new Article 212.1, sometimes known as Dadin’s Law, which made repeated infractions of Russia’s increasingly draconian protest restrictions a criminal offence in 2014.
In his instance, this just meant standing on Moscow’s streets with a flag. Dadin was sentenced to two and a half years in prison and went on hunger strike shortly after being placed in a punishment cell.
His prison guards then tortured him to force him to stop. Soon after his release in 2017, I met him in Moscow, where he recalled being suspended from a wall by his chained wrists.
The guards then threatened him with rape. He admitted that the brutality almost broke him.
So, when I learnt Dadin had joined a battalion of Russian volunteers fighting for Ukraine, I contacted him again earlier this year, and we had several lengthy conversations.
“I can’t sit by and do nothing and so become an accomplice to Russian evil, to its crimes,” Dadin explained his decision to sign up, just as principled and intense as I remembered him.
He had always considered himself a pacifist, but now he stated his reasons for picking up arms: “the aggression, the mass killing, the torture, rape, and looting.”
Nonetheless, he chose the handle Gandhi. Dadin felt personally responsible for Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbour.
He claimed that he and other Russians had failed to deter Vladimir Putin by allowing themselves to be intimidated off the streets by police violence and the possibility of imprisonment.
“The main thing now is to act according to my conscience,” Dadin wrote to me one night from near the frontline in Sumy.
He joined the Siberian Battalion in June 2023 and then the Freedom of Russia Legion last winter, both of which are officially members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
