Ildar Dadin, a well-known Russian opposition activist who was fighting in Ukraine on the side of Kyiv, has been killed in action, according to the group that recruited him.<\/p>\n
A spokeswoman for that group, the Civic Council, told the BBC that Dadin had died, adding that \u201che was, and he remains a hero\u201d.<\/p>\n
The activist-turned-fighter was killed when soldiers from his volunteer battalion, the Freedom of Russia Legion, came under Russian artillery fire in the Kharkiv region of north-eastern Ukraine.<\/p>\n
For now, there are no more details and the Legion itself won\u2019t comment whilst it says a military operation is still active.<\/p>\n
But Ilia Ponamarev, an exiled Russian opposition politician with previous links to the Legion, has told the BBC he is \u201ccertain, alas\u201d that Dadin is dead.<\/p>\n
Another source clarified that this was \u201cconfirmed by those who were with him in battle\u201d.<\/p>\n
The latest messages I\u2019ve sent to his phone are still marked \u201cunread\u201d.<\/p>\n
Ildar Dadin became known in Russia a decade ago for his persistence in staging peaceful protests as political repression there intensified.<\/p>\n
He was the first person prosecuted under a new Article 212.1 \u2013 quickly dubbed Dadin\u2019s Law \u2013 that in 2014 made it a criminal offence to commit repeat violations of Russia\u2019s increasingly restrictive rules on protest.<\/p>\n
In his case, that simply meant standing on the streets of Moscow with a banner.<\/p>\n
Sentenced to two and a half years, Dadin was placed in a punishment cell and immediately went on hunger strike. His prison guards then tortured him to get him to stop.<\/p>\n
Soon after his release in 2017, I met him in Moscow and he described being hung from a wall by his cuffed wrists. The guards had then threatened him with rape. He admitted that the brutality nearly broke him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
So when I learned that Dadin had joined a battalion of Russian volunteers fighting for Ukraine, I got back in touch and earlier this year and we had a series of long exchanges.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t sit by and do nothing and so become an accomplice to Russian evil, to its crimes,\u201d Dadin explained his decision to sign-up, just as principled and intense as I remembered him.<\/p>\n
He\u2019d always considered himself a pacifist but now listed his reasons for taking-up arms: \u201cThe aggression, the mass killing, the torture, rape and looting.\u201d Still, he chose the callsign Gandhi.<\/p>\n
Dadin felt deeply that that he bore personal responsibility for Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of its neighbour.<\/p>\n
He argued that he and fellow Russians had failed to stop Vladimir Putin, allowing themselves to be scared off the streets by police violence and the threat of prison.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe main thing now is to act according to my conscience,\u201d Dadin wrote to me one night from near the frontline in Sumy.<\/p>\n
He initially signed-up with the Siberian Battalion in June 2023 before moving to the Freedom of Russia Legion last winter \u2013 both officially part of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.<\/p>\n
Recruits are mainly Russian citizens who hope that helping Ukraine defeat Vladimir Putin will be a first step towards ending his rule in the Kremlin.<\/p>\n
Their numbers aren\u2019t clear, nor their effectiveness as a fighting force.<\/p>\n
They have claimed some successes, including a cross-border incursion into Russia earlier this year at the time of Putin\u2019s re-election.<\/p>\n
But for Dadin, the experience wasn\u2019t quite as he\u2019d hoped.<\/p>\n
He felt that some of the missions his unit were sent on were \u201cpointless\u201d in any military sense.<\/p>\n
He described one battle where he ended up pinned down for eight hours by Russian fire in a bomb crater, with a drone trying to drop a grenade on him, whilst a fellow volunteer soldier bled to death.<\/p>\n
And like many Ukrainian soldiers, he was exhausted, fighting with barely any days off and limping from a wound to his hip.<\/p>\n
I wondered whether he might leave, but Dadin was clear his conscience would not allow him to sit \u201con the sidelines\u201d.<\/p>\n
Not whilst Ukrainians were being killed, as he put it, \u201cby Russian criminals\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cI tried to stop Russia \u2013 but did I do it? No,\u201d he berated himself in one of our last chats. \u201cAnd thousands of people have been killed because I did not do enough.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those who sent him to fight, disagree. \u201cIldar was strong, brave, principled and honest,\u201d the Civic Council wrote. \u201cThat\u2019s how we should remember him.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The post Russian opposition activist killed fighting for Ukraine<\/a> first appeared on KBC<\/a>.<\/p>\n The post Russian opposition activist killed fighting for Ukraine<\/a> appeared first on KBC<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ildar Dadin, a well-known Russian opposition activist who was fighting in Ukraine on the side of Kyiv, has been killed in action, according to the group that recruited him. A spokeswoman for that group, the Civic Council, told the BBC that Dadin had died, adding that \u201che was, and he remains a hero\u201d. The activist-turned-fighter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98481\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}