Announcing the death of Ildar Dadin, a well-known Russian opposition activist fighting in Ukraine on kyiv’s side, the spokeswoman for the group that recruited him, the Civic Council, told the BBC that Dadin “was and remains a hero.” ”.
The activist-turned-fighter died this week when soldiers from his volunteer battalion, Russia’s Freedom Legion, came under fire from Russian artillery in the Kharkiv region of northeastern Ukraine.
Dadin became known in Russia a decade ago for his persistence in organizing peaceful protests as political repression there intensified.
He was the first person to be prosecuted under a new Article 212.1 (quickly known as Dadin’s Law), which in 2014 made it a criminal offense to commit repeated violations of Russia’s increasingly restrictive rules on protests.
In his case, that simply meant standing on the streets of Moscow with a banner.
Sentenced to two and a half years in prison, Dadin was locked in a punishment cell and immediately went on hunger strike.
The prison guards tortured him to force him to eat.
Shortly after his release in 2017, I met him in Moscow and he told me that he had been hanged from a wall with his wrists handcuffed.
The guards threatened to rape him.
He admitted that the brutality almost destroyed him.
“I can’t sit still”
When I learned that Dadin had joined a battalion of Russian volunteers fighting for Ukraine, I contacted him again earlier this year and we had a series of long exchanges.
“I cannot sit back and do nothing and become an accomplice to Russian evil, to their crimes,” Dadin explained to me, referring to his decision to enlist, as upright and intense as he remembered.
He had always considered himself a pacifist, but now he listed his reasons for taking up arms: “Aggression, mass murder, torture, rape and looting.”
Still, he chose the nickname “Gandhi.”
Dadin felt deeply that he bore personal responsibility for Russia’s large-scale invasion of its neighbor.
He argued that he and his fellow Russians had failed to stop Vladimir Putin, having been frightened and left the streets by police violence and the threat of prison.
“The main thing now is to act according to my conscience,” Dadin wrote to me one night from near the front line in Sumy.
“I didn’t do enough”
He initially enlisted in the Siberian Battalion in June 2023, before moving to the Russian Freedom Legion last winter, both officially part of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
The recruits are mainly Russian citizens who hope that helping Ukraine defeat Vladimir Putin will be a first step in ending his rule in the Kremlin.
Their numbers and effectiveness as a fighting force are unclear.
They have achieved some successes, including a cross-border raid into Russia earlier this year, around the time of Putin’s re-election.
But for Dadin, the experience was not what he expected.
He considered some of the missions his unit was sent on to be “useless” in a military sense.
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 throw a grenade at him, while a fellow volunteer soldier bled to death.
And like many Ukrainian soldiers, he was exhausted, fighting with almost no rest and limping due to a hip wound.
I wondered if he would leave, but Dadin was clear that his conscience would not allow him to remain “on the sidelines.”
Not while Ukrainians continued to be murdered, as he put it, “by Russian criminals.”
“I tried to stop Russia, but did I succeed? No”he reproached himself in one of our last talks.
“And thousands of people have died because I didn’t do enough.”
Those who sent him to fight do not agree.
“Ildar was strong, brave, principled and honest”wrote the Civic Council. “This is how we should remember him.”
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