Mariano García Calatayud, a 75-year-old Spanish volunteer humanitarian worker, was forcibly disappeared by the occupying Russian authorities on 19 March 2022 in the Ukrainian city of Kherson. He disappeared after he attended a peaceful protest against the occupation. Russian authorities have been holding him incommunicado since then, and first officially acknowledged his detention in April 2023 only but gave no legal grounds for it. In May 2023, independent Russian media sources published testimonies of former prisoners who confirmed hie poor health and claimed they’d witnessed Mariano García Calatayud being tortured by prison guards.
