Anti-Kremlin Activist Killed While Serving in Ukraine’s Foreign Legion

By Matthew Grace

On October 5^th, the renowned Russian opposition activist, Ildar Dadin, was reported as having been killed in action while serving in a Ukrainian volunteer battalion according to the group that recruited him and held that he “remains a hero”. Dadin, callsign “Ghandhi”, joined the fight in June of 2023 and was killed when his volunteer battalion, the Freedom from Russia Legion, comprised of mainly Russian citizens seeking the end of Putin’s rule, was hit by Russian artillery in the Kharkiv salient in northern Ukraine. Ilia Ponamarev, an exiled Russian opposition politician with ties to the Freedom of Russia Legion, and a friend of Dadin, informed that he is certain that Dadin is dead which was also confirmed by “those who were in battle with him”. Ildar Dadin stepped foot into the spotlight a decade ago with his persistent peaceful protests in Russia when political repression intensified.

He was the first person prosecuted under a new Article 212.1, “Dadin’s Law”, in 2014 which made it a criminal offense to commit repeat violations of Russia growing restrictive protesting regulations. He was sentenced to two and a half years imprisonment and placed in a punishment cell where he went on hunger strike but was tortured to stop. After his release in 2017, he described being hung to a wall with his wrists cuffed and threatened with rape by the guards. His reasoning for joining the Ukrainian legion was relayed from Ponamarev who stated that Dadin could not “sit by and do nothing and so become an accomplice to Russian evil, to its crimes… the aggression, the mass killings, the torture, rape and looting… the main thing now is to act according to my conscience”. Dadin described his service with Ponamarev as not “quite as he’d hoped” and that he felt many of his unit’s missions were “pointless” militarily and often felt exhausted and spent, but continued because he could not sit “on the sidelines” while Ukrainians were being killed by “Russian criminals”. Dadin’s death, although of very different circumstances, follows the trend of those who oppose the Kremlin in Russia being silenced, harkening to Alexi Navalny’s death in prison earlier this year in February.