{"id":42501,"date":"2024-10-07T03:49:01","date_gmt":"2024-10-07T03:49:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/?p=42501"},"modified":"2024-10-07T03:49:06","modified_gmt":"2024-10-07T03:49:06","slug":"russian-opposition-activist-killed-fighting-for-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/?p=42501","title":{"rendered":"Russian opposition activist killed fighting for Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

BBC: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\n\n\n

A spokeswoman for that group, the Civic Council, told the BBC that Dadin had died, adding that “he was, and he remains a hero”.<\/p>\n\n\n\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\n\n\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\n\n\n

But Ilia Ponamarev, an exiled Russian opposition politician with previous links to the Legion, has told the BBC he is “certain, alas” that Dadin is dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another source clarified that this was “confirmed by those who were with him in battle”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The latest messages I\u2019ve sent to his phone are still marked “unread”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ildar Dadin became known in Russia a decade ago for his persistence in staging peaceful protests<\/a> as political repression there intensified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was the first person prosecuted under a new Article 212.1 – quickly dubbed Dadin\u2019s Law – that in 2014 made it a criminal offence to commit repeat violations of Russia\u2019s increasingly restrictive rules on protest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his case, that simply meant standing on the streets of Moscow with a banner.<\/p>\n\n\n\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\n\n\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.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\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\n\n\n

“I can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He\u2019d always considered himself a pacifist but now listed his reasons for taking-up arms: “The aggression, the mass killing, the torture, rape and looting.” Still, he chose the callsign Gandhi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dadin felt deeply that that he bore personal responsibility for Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of its neighbour.<\/p>\n\n\n\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\n\n\n

“The main thing now is to act according to my conscience,” Dadin wrote to me one night from near the frontline in Sumy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He initially signed-up with the Siberian Battalion in June 2023 before moving to the Freedom of Russia Legion last winter – both officially part of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.<\/p>\n\n\n\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\n\n\n

Their numbers aren\u2019t clear, nor their effectiveness as a fighting force.<\/p>\n\n\n\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\n\n\n

But for Dadin, the experience wasn\u2019t quite as he\u2019d hoped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He felt that some of the missions his unit were sent on were “pointless” in any military sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\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\n\n\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\n\n\n

I wondered whether he might leave, but Dadin was clear his conscience would not allow him to sit “on the sidelines”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not whilst Ukrainians were being killed, as he put it, “by Russian criminals”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I tried to stop Russia – but did I do it? No,” he berated himself in one of our last chats. “And thousands of people have been killed because I did not do enough.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those who sent him to fight, disagree. “Ildar was strong, brave, principled and honest,” the Civic Council wrote. “That\u2019s how we should remember him.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BBC: 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 “he was, and he remains a hero”. 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. For now, there are no more details and the Legion itself won\u2019t comment whilst it says a military operation… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42502,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-in-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42501"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42503,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42501\/revisions\/42503"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/42502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}