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The widow of anti-Kremlin activist Ildar Dadin, who was killed fighting for Ukraine last month, accused the Freedom of Russia Legion of burying her late husband without her permission and suggested that members of the pro-Kyiv paramilitary group may have covered up the cause of his death.
Dadin had fought alongside the Ukrainian armed forces as a member of the Freedom of Russia Legion, which is made up of Russian nationals who took up arms against the Russian army after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Dadin’s relatives confirmed his death in early October. His body was buried in Kyiv on Thursday, according to photographs and a video published by Freedom of Russia Legion spokesman Alexei Baranovsky.
“Ildar didn’t accidentally find himself armed in Ukraine defending the Ukrainian people. His entire life was an uncompromising struggle with Putin’s inhumane system that’s destroying Russia and its neighbors,” one soldier said at Dadin’s funeral.
His widow, Alessandra Sveshnikova, said she learned about his cremation and burial of his ashes from media reports. “This happened without my knowledge or permission,” she wrote on Facebook.
“All this time, I was trying to get my husband’s body from the Freedom of Russia Legion to bury him with dignity next to my father,” Sveshnikova added. “No one contacted me about Ildar’s death, although they had (and still have) Ildar’s passport with our marriage stamp and a copy of our marriage certificate.”
Sveshnikova shared screenshots of messages between her and members of the Freedom of Russian Legion. In one of the messages, someone writing from the group’s Facebook page tells Sveshnikova that Dadin had not indicated her as his wife or next-of-kin.
Sveshnikova claimed that Dadin had confided to her that he and the Legion’s command had run into conflicts that led him to “fear a bullet in his back.”
“There were constantly changing versions of how my husband died: first as a result of shelling, then from a drone attack, now the Legion officially said Ildar died from machine gun fire,” she said. “I’m beginning to doubt more and more that Ildar died at the hands of the [Russian] occupiers.”
The Moscow Times, which could not immediately verify the claims, contacted Sveshnikova for comment.