Getty Images
Russian opposition activist Eldar Dadin is pictured in March 2017 after his release from a Russian prison
Eldar Dadin, a well-known Russian opposition activist who was fighting in Ukraine alongside Kiev, was killed in action, according to the group that recruited him.
A spokeswoman for the Civil Council told the BBC that Dadin had died, adding that “he was a hero and will remain so.”
The activist-turned-fighter was killed when soldiers from his volunteer battalion, the Freedom Corps of Russia, came under Russian artillery fire in the Kharkiv region of northeastern Ukraine.
At the moment, there are no further details and the Corps itself will not comment while saying that the military operation remains active.
But Ilya Ponmarev, an exiled Russian opposition politician with former links to the Legion, told the BBC he was “sure, unfortunately” that Dadin was dead.
Another source explained that this was “confirmed by those who were with him in the battle.”
The last messages you sent to his phone are still marked as unread.
Eldar Dadin became well-known in Russia a decade ago for his insistence on organizing peaceful protests as political repression intensified there.
He was the first person to be prosecuted under the new Article 212.1 – soon dubbed Dadin’s Law – which in 2014 made it a criminal offense to commit repeated violations of Russia’s increasingly restrictive rules on protest.
In his case, that simply meant standing in the streets of Moscow holding a sign.
Dadin was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, was placed in a punishment cell and immediately began a hunger strike. Then the prison guards tortured him to get him to stop.
Shortly after his release in 2017, I met him in Moscow and he described being pinned to a wall by his shackled wrists. Then the guards threatened him with rape. He admitted that the brutality almost broke him.
So when she learned that Dadin had joined a battalion of Russian volunteers fighting for Ukraine, she called me back earlier this year and we had a series of long conversations.
“I cannot sit and do nothing, and thus become an accomplice in Russian evil, in its crimes,” Dadin explained his decision to sign up, exactly as I remember it.
He had always considered himself a pacifist but now stated his reasons for taking up arms: “aggression, mass murder, torture, rape and plunder.” However, he chose the call sign Gandhi.
Dadin felt deeply that he bore personal responsibility for the large-scale Russian invasion of its neighbour.
He said he and his fellow Russians had failed to stop Vladimir Putin, allowing themselves to be feared from the streets by police violence and the threat of imprisonment.
“The main thing now is to act according to my conscience,” Dadin wrote to me one night near the front line in Sumy.
He initially registered with the Siberian Regiment in June 2023 before transferring to Russia’s Freedom Corps last winter – both of which are officially part of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Most of the recruits are Russian citizens who hope that helping Ukraine defeat Vladimir Putin will be a first step toward ending his rule in the Kremlin.
Their numbers are not clear, nor is their effectiveness as a fighting force.
They have claimed some successes, including a cross-border incursion into Russia earlier this year at the time of Putin’s re-election.
But for Dadin, the experience was not what he had hoped.
He felt that some of the missions sent by his unit were “useless” in any military sense.
He described one battle where he ended up trapped for eight hours by Russian fire in a bomb crater, as a drone tried to drop a grenade on him, while a fellow volunteer soldier bled to death.
Like many Ukrainian soldiers, he was exhausted, fighting with almost no rest days, and limping from a wound to his hip.
She wondered if he would leave, but Dadin was relieved 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 did I do it? No,” he chided himself in one of our recent conversations. “And thousands of people were killed because I didn’t do enough.”
Those who sent him to fight disagree. “Eldar was strong, brave, principled and honest,” the civil council wrote. “That’s how we should remember him.”
