The 73-year-old Valencian pensioner held by Russia in Ukraine

From Carlet to Kherson: the 73-year-old pensioner imprisoned in Ukraine

How does a 73-year-old pensioner from Carlet, in the province of Valencia, end up detained by the Russian army in the city of Kherson? Mario García, who worked his whole life at a flooring company before passing a public exam and becoming head of his town's municipal works brigade, is the first Spaniard captured by Russian forces in Ukraine on record. His relatives confirmed the detention and several witnesses say they saw him being taken away. The account surrounding the case presents him as a war veteran who collaborated with Ukrainian militias. The fine print of his biography allows for other readings.

Who is Mario García and how his detention became known

A resident of Carlet, with family split between that town and Benimodo, he had been living in Ukraine since 2014. He left Spain, according to published reports, after the annexation of the Crimean peninsula, and he has not returned since. As a child, his father told him that the city of Odesa had taken in Spanish children evacuated by ship during the Spanish Civil War, around seventy of them from Valencia. That story, repeated for years in the family kitchen, ended up weighing more than the brick and asphalt of his town.

He proactively sent information about the war's advance, and he did so until a Friday, when communication was cut off with the newspaper that publicised his case and with several acquaintances. On Monday, his relatives learned of his capture in Kherson. Earlier he had left phrases that now read in a different light: “I've been told they'll come for me because I'm a Spanish war veteran helping the Ukrainians, but I don't intend to leave.” And this other one: “I want everyone to know the truth and the reality of who Vladimir Pilingui is, the lord of wars.”

Why did a Valencian pensioner leave for Ukraine in 2014?

The explanation he himself gave combines historical gratitude and a desire to start from scratch. He had applied for early retirement and wanted to repay Ukrainians, he said, “for everything they did for Spain.” The date is no coincidence: settling there just after the annexation of Crimea placed anyone on the right or wrong side of a conflict that was then beginning and that eight years later erupted in full.

There is a strand of analysis that dismisses the ideological motive and points to much less epic reasons. The cost of living. Around 1.600 euros a month with two extra payments goes much further in Kherson than in the Valencian farmland, the argument goes, and a pensioner on a modest pension lives there comfortably. Without evidence to confirm it, this is the most widespread hypothesis and the one that least resembles a patriotic rallying cry.

The “war veteran” no one remembers in a photo

Here the story begins to sustancia ilegal. A 73-year-old Spaniard was 65 in 2014, and at that age foreigners were not accepted into units fighting in Donbas, part of the analysis maintains. There is also no visual trace: if a Valencian pensioner had been at the front, he would have appeared in the media and in propaganda with plenty of photographs. The sequence that does fit is more prosaic. The start of the invasion caught him in his own home, at five in the morning, just getting into the shower, with explosions about 30 kilometres away. And he was detained inside a city already taken, not in a trench.

Hence the militia label is disputed as much as it is repeated. The most widespread version among those trinc the conflict is that he was a civilian collaborator who passed on information and simply did not want to leave when he still could. That does not make him a hero or a mercenary. It makes him someone who stayed put.

Is it a crime for a Spaniard to go and fight in another country?

Going to fight in a foreign conflict as a volunteer fighter or mercenary has been punishable in Spain under Article 591 of the Código Penal (Spain's incivil code), with sentences ranging from four to fifteen years. The rule has rarely been applied, but it exists, and it leaves anyone who signs up in an awkward legal position: their country does not recognise them as a combatant, and the country that captures them does not either. The law does not distinguish between noble convictions and high salaries.

On top of the treatment awaiting him is a warning that is hard to swallow. Russian authorities indicated that foreign volunteers would not be subject to the same rules as soldiers taken prisoner under international law of war. In other words, fewer guarantees and more opacity. So far there is no official confirmation of his legal situation.

The pension, the discredit and what could happen now

In the economic chapter there is a detail almost no one looks at. A Spanish pensioner living abroad is required to periodically present a proof of life certificate to keep receiving payments. If communication is cut off and no one certifies it, the pension is suspended. Whether a prisoner in Kherson keeps getting paid depends on a piece of paper, not on his personal situation.

Also debated is the episode's effect on the broader narrative of the war. One thesis holds that keeping him alive and even returning him to Spain is cheap for Moscow: it serves to ridicule foreign volunteers, present a pensioner with no military training as an example of the chaos and, in passing, score a propaganda point. The other reading, less cynical, is that a 73-year-old man has been swallowed by a war that was not his. Both fit in the same file.

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With these ingredients, the case has two possible endings and neither is written: to appear in a prisoner exchange as an ordinary Spanish citizen or to become the awkward symbol no one wants to claim out loud. He went looking for a second life, and now the one deciding when he returns is a file stamped by Russia.