Ukrainians call him Mario because Mariano is a strange name for them, difficult to remember in a Slavic country. But in Ukraine, they still remember him as “Super Mario,” as he was dubbed by KHPG, a Kharkiv-based human rights NGO that’s been tracking him. Mariano García Calatayud is a retiree from Carlet, a small town in Spain’s Mediterranean Valencia region, who decided to move to Ukraine in 2014. On March 19, 2022, three weeks after the Russian invasion began, the Russian security services arrested him in the occupied city of Kherson. Almost 40 months later, his family and friends do not know what has become of him.

In war-torn Ukraine, there is an abundance of foreigners with peculiar life circumstances. There are mercenaries, there are men and women who pursuing love, there are idealists, adventurers, and there are people fleeing irreparable problems in their home countries. García Calatayud is a difficult case to classify. In 2014, at the age of 66, recently retired and divorced from his wife, he decided to move to Kyiv. Until then, he had been a municipal employee of city of Carlet, where he served as the local government’s construction site manager. That year, war broke out in the Donbas region (formed by the Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in the east) between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian forces. Also that year, Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula by force.

García Calatayud had no direct ties to Ukraine. He also didn’t speak Russian or Ukrainian. Tetiana Marina Olesksandrivna, his partner, and Francisco Santiesteban, a friend and colleague at the UGT labor union to which he was affiliated, say he had an idealized vision of the country because his father or his grandfather—they can’t remember which—was a Republican activist who, after the Spanish Civil War, sought shelter in the Soviet Union, in Odessa. One of his sons, David García, claims that Mariano’s father was never in this southern Ukrainian city, but he doesn’t know whether his grandfather might have been exiled there.

“Mariano is a convinced socialist, and he was very mixed up in his head, he had an image of the USSR that wasn’t real,” says Olena Lashtova, one of his closest friends in Ukraine. “He soon realized that Russia is an imperialist power, and he became committed to helping Ukraine,” she says.

David García points out that the main reason his father moved to Ukraine was his lifelong dedication to helping others. “He mainly helped children and schools,” says his son. “Of course, we tried to convince him to return to Spain, especially as the war escalated [before the invasion], but he felt fine in Ukraine,” he adds.

Lashtova met Mariano in 2016, during numerous trips they both made as volunteer workers, delivering essential aid to the population of Donetsk. He discovered Kherson, a key center of the Ukrainian resistance near Crimea in the south of the country, through a friend, says Oleksandrivna. “He fell in love with the city because he had lived in Kyiv for a year, and it was too big for him. In Kherson, everyone knew him and he lived a more family-oriented life,” adds Lashtova.

No one from the Spanish community in Kherson remains, says his partner. She herself has moved to Scotland, where she is undergoing medical treatment and trying to find a job. The city was liberated from Russian occupation in November 2022, but its location, right on the war front, exposes it to daily attacks by the invaders. Today, according to provincial authorities, only 20% of the pre-war population remains.

García Calatayud met Oleksandrivna six weeks before the Russian invasion began in February 2022. Despite the age difference (she is 30 years younger than him), they established a relationship. But it was short-lived. In the first days of the war, the Russians entered Kherson. It was the only provincial capital they occupied with such astonishing ease, thanks to an extensive network of collaborators.

Mariano was known for participating in all the local protests against the occupation. His friends recall him always being on the front lines, heckling the Russian military. Oleksandrivna, Santiesteban and Lashtova all agree that for days they warned the Spanish volunteer to leave the city, that the invader’s security forces surely had him in their sights.

“The day before his arrest, I told him to be careful, and on St. Joseph’s Day in Valencia [March 19], he disappeared,” Santiesteban recalls. “I asked him to leave Kherson,” Lashtova says, “that it would end badly, but he was very stubborn. We spoke every day, and when he didn’t answer my call on March 19 [2022], I figured that something had happened.”

His first incarceration was in the cells of the detention center on Teploenergetikiv Street in Kherson, a place known for its torture and interrogations. Once there, his trail was lost for a year.

Much of the search for García Calatayud has been carried out by Santiesteban in Spain and Oleksandrivna in Ukraine. She and the family contacted a team of Russian lawyers who mediated with the authorities of the invading country. The first official confirmation from the occupiers regarding Mariano’s whereabouts came in April 2023, a year after his arrest: the Russian military prosecutor’s office declared that the Spaniard was in Crimea, in the Sizo-2 prison in Simferopol, under investigation “to clarify his involvement in carrying out acts that threaten the security of the Russian Federation.”

Testimonies from Ukrainian citizens who met him in SIZO-2 reported that García Calatayud was tortured with electric shocks, attacks by guard dogs, and the extraction of teeth. This was reported in an Amnesty International campaign demanding his release. Santiesteban and Oleksandrivna are pessimistic about how he may have recovered from this experience, because he suffers from heart problems. Today, if he is still alive, he is 77 years old.

The occupying authorities of Crimea reported in the fall of 2023 that García Calatayud had left the peninsula for Kherson Province (the eastern half of this region is occupied). The military document did not specify whether he had left on his own or been transferred to another prison. It also did not specify whether any charges had been brought against him.

Last clue, Moscow

Since then, few clues have emerged about his possible whereabouts, all of them tenuous. Elena Taranova, spokesperson for the legal team following his case, explains that in the multiple requests sent to the Russian authorities, they have received vague responses from the occupying military administrations in the Black Sea, Kherson, Donetsk, and also from the central offices in Moscow. “Everyone is passing the buck among themselves; the only concrete responses were those from Crimea in 2023,” says Taranova.

David García said that the Spanish National Police notified him in February 2024 that his father could also be imprisoned in the Moscow region. Taranova explains that this is a possibility, but without any concrete evidence to support it. On July 1, the family held a videoconference with the Moscow Red Cross, which pledged to try to locate the Spaniard in the Russian capital.

The Russian government has never responded to requests for information from the Spanish government or the Red Cross. Oleksandrivna claims that during POW exchanges, the intelligence services of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense (GUR) show the returning Ukrainians more than 80 photos of missing civilian foreigners, including García Calatayud. “He’s definitely changed a lot now; just look at how the released soldiers return, so emaciated,” says her partner.

70,000 missing, 300 foreigners

Artur Dobroserdov, the Ukrainian government commissioner for persons missing during the war, stated in a press conference on July 1 that there are 300 foreigners missing, both military personnel and civilians. Many of them are Latin American mercenaries. As of May, the Ukrainian Ministry of the Interior estimates the total number of missing persons at 70,000, the vast majority of whom are soldiers. These are people like another Spaniard, Miguel Ortiz, a soldier whose comrades believe died in combat in 2023, but since his body has not been recovered, his death cannot be confirmed.

At a press conference on July 1, the Ukrainian Ministry of the Interior presented a new website that unifies, for the first time, all available documentation and data on missing persons. It is expected to be available in English and Spanish in the coming months.

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What did save Iran after 12 days of Israeli total control of its airspace, which facilitated an extraordinary onslaught on Iran’s Islamic Republic that hit its nuclear programme, destroyed many of its symbols of government, and decapitated its military hierarchy? Suppose you ask Fayyaz Zahed, an Iranian reformist political analyst. In that case, he answers that “it was not the regime’s delusional ideology, but Iran’s ancient history, and the experience of surviving invasions by Alexander the Great, the Mongols, and the Arabs.”

Similar to China’s case, Iran’s rich history and imperial legacy have shaped its self-perception as the center of the civilized world — a nation destined for greatness — and informed its policies in the Middle East and beyond. The arc of Iran’s history spread from centuries of imperial grandeur in antiquity to the moment when the empire faced a new power rising in the south, Islam, thus marking the beginning of a Persian decline and eventual collapse in the 19th century under the imperial ambitions of Great Britain and Russia. Past greatness has made the dire memories of encroachment by foreign powers in the contemporary era an Iranian version of China’s “Century of Humiliation.”

Hence, like China, Iran’s modern history has been a struggle for status befitting a great power, marked by a vigilant jealousy of its sovereignty. A non-Arab country in an Arab region, unique also for being the only state in the Muslim universe having Shia as a state religion, Iran’s external relationship needs to be understood against its self-perceived exceptionalism. Closer to our time, the consequential meaning of the British-American coup that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 laid the groundwork for popular anti-Western sentiment that grew throughout the 1970s, ultimately leading to the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Since then, there has been a tendency in the West to see Iran as a monolith of Ayatollahs and radicals bent on destroying Israel, for which they need the nuclear bomb. In such a scenario, Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s Churchill, fighting heroically to save his people from imminent annihilation. This, I am afraid, is an utterly simplistic, even false, reading of a far more complex reality. Iran is a richly diverse society, and so is its political class. The division between reformists and fundamentalists within the political system is a genuine one. The Iranian reformists, first among them the current president, Masoud Pezeshkian, and his entire team, want to rein in the nuclear project, reach an accommodation with the West, and bring an end to the sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy. It is there that they perceive the threat to the regime’s survival.

The drive to nuclear status has been an obsession of the Ayatollahs, their most potent symbol, and the insurance for regime survival, the ultimate protective shield of the Islamic revolution against its challengers in the region and beyond. North Korea is their proof. Although the nuclear program has never delivered a bomb, and only scant energy at astronomical cost, it has been the mullahs’ most potent nationalist symbol. Securing the regime’s survival is the objective, not annihilating Israel, which is far more likely to be destroyed at the end of a long war of attrition, for which the Iranians created and lavishly financed the ring of proxies surrounding the Jewish state, than under a mushroom cloud.

If it wanted a nuclear bomb, Iran could have produced it long ago. Iran’s scientific and technological excellence, supported by a rich human capital, makes it far better positioned than North Korea and Pakistan, two nuclear powers, to join the nuclear club. If Iran doesn’t yet have the bomb, it is because it has not yet made the political decision to produce it. This war may have settled the debate inside Iran’s political class in favour of the bomb. Iran’s now demonstrated vulnerability is proof of its need for a nuclear bomb, like North Korea’s, to protect itself.

In other words, Netanyahu will go down in history not as Israel’s Churchill, as he presumes to be, but as the father of the Iranian atom bomb. He has twice torpedoed a diplomatic solution that the Iranians always wanted, first when he convinced Donald Trump in 2018 to withdraw from Obama’s 2015 nuclear agreement, whose provisions the Iranians fulfilled to the letter, and now by starting a war in the middle of a negotiating process over a new nuclear deal.

Moreover, since the end of the Iran War, Netanyahu and his friend in the White House, Donald Trump, are engaged in a campaign of deception that obscures the picture. U.S. intelligence knows better than its own president. Neither Iran’s nuclear programme nor its ballistic missile threat has been obliterated; possibly the atomic project was postponed by only a few months. The Iranians have taken away from the Fordow site more than 400 kilograms of enriched uranium to 60% which can be enriched to 90% in a matter of days, enough to produce 10 warheads. There are undamaged centrifuges, there are enough scientists, and there are unknown sites. Iran has already stopped any watchdog from monitoring its nuclear activities, and it will not be a surprise if it decides to abandon the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty).

Still, this war is a moment of reckoning for the Islamic Republic, as its hollow empire has been diminished by Israel’s breaking of its entire proxy system. Sunni Pan-Arabism has been a fiction, and Shiite Islam was supposed to supplant it as the voice of the masses. Ayatollah Khomeini, the father of the revolution, and his current successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, positioned themselves as the Frantz Fanons of our age who would redeem the wretched of the earth.

But, instead of redemption, what Israel’s combat pilots found lying under the skies of Tehran was an unpopular and repressive Iranian regime that has spent billions of dollars on a nuclear program and on projecting the Islamic Revolution through armed regional proxies, while presiding over a domestic economic disaster and stifling paralysis. Iran’s gross domestic product, or total output, has fallen 45% since 2012. Crippling international sanctions over the nuclear program contributed to this downward spiral, but so did corruption, a bungled privatization program and bloated state companies.

The regime, remote from a youthful and aspirational society, looks sclerotic to many, and its religious leadership is now up against the wall. “The Islamic Republic is a rotten tooth waiting to be plucked, like the Soviet Union in its latter years,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. If we pursue the Chinese simile, China’s political stability requires, according to Xi Jinping, an “overall structure of values,” a structure that in Iran relies on a minority of the people and a corrupt, to the bone, nomenclature that pervades them.

In rethinking its post-war strategy, Iran does not have too many friends to rely on. Its “allies” were a disappointment. Russia is entangled in the Ukrainian quagmire, China is happy seeing the United States consumed by the forever wars of the Middle East, Syria is now negotiating a peace deal with Israel, and Iran’s proxies have all been diminished by Israel.

Still, recent history shows that Iran has always been capable of adapting its policies to its weaknesses. In 1988, to save the regime from destruction, it accepted a dishonoured end to its war with Iraq. In 2003, following the U.S. invasion that had toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan and Iran’s nemesis, Saddam Hussein, in Iraq, the Ayatollahs were willing to reach a Grand Bargain with the American Satan, giving up their entire nuclear programme and dismantling their regional system of proxies.

Alas, the radicals in Tehran proved to be far more rational than the Americans. The answer to Iran’s demarche came from then vice president Dick Cheney. “We do not negotiate with evil,” he said. This is a poignant lesson in the power of stupidity in history. Iran is not in a dissimilar condition these days. It is willing to negotiate with the U.S. a nuclear deal in exchange for shielding the regime from an American or Israeli attack. This is not about a final peace settlement; it is about buying time while the regime regroups and revises its strategy to adapt it to the changing conditions.

Iran’s clash with Israel, a peer competitor for regional supremacy and a bitter theological enemy, is a conflict between two existentially vulnerable powers. This, I would argue, is a typical Thucydides Trap, which Israel would like to see usher in a definite showdown. Israel’s zero-sum game strategy is driven by its Holocaustic fears and unrealistic aspirations to uncontested hegemony. Iran’s idea of the destruction of Israel stems from a Shiite eschatological belief in the return of the last Islamic messiah, Imam Mahdi, amid an Armageddon that the destruction of Israel will trigger.

If history has any lesson in it for Iran, it is that Shi‘ism should avoid falling into the same delusional trap of destroying Israel that had doomed Sunni pan-Arabism. By pouring its energy and resources into a war of annihilation against Israel, it would jeopardize its primary objective: regime survival. Like Xi Jinping, Supreme Leader Khamenei is haunted by the memory of the fall of the Soviet Union. The lessons they both drew are similar: stick to the fundamentals of the regime, only that China is a global power, and Iran is a diminished, decimated power at war with Big Satan standing behind the Little Satan.

But Iran is not alone in letting illusory ambitions cloud its judgment. If Israel cannot destroy Iran’s nuclear program, it certainly cannot achieve total victory over Iran’s regime. The idea of toppling the Iranian regime through a bombing campaign, a design that Netanyahu had clearly set as an objective, was a delusion, a total lack of historical culture. Both Donald Trump’s call for Iran’s “total surrender” and Netanyahu’s drive for regime change through a bombing campaign were delusions, a total lack of historical culture. The Allies’ call for Germany’s “unconditional surrender” in World War II was what kept the Nazi regime to fight to the bitter end. And, regime change requires, as in Iraq, boots on the ground, which in this case would be suicidal to the invaders. In Iran, there are now signs of a patriotic surge even among opponents of the regime who have spent time in prison.

It is, then, not just Iran: none of Israel’s security challenges can be overcome through “total victory.” The Islamic Republic is humiliated and not in a place it’s ever been before, but it could still stay alive long enough to exhaust Israel in a war of attrition and get the United States entangled in a conflict it does not want. No matter how many bombs Netanyahu drops, diplomacy will remain the only answer. Nor could Israel hope for the tacit complicity the Arab states demonstrated in the war against Hamas and Hezbollah. While these countries have no love for Iran, they have a vested interest in regional stability, primarily as they work to diversify their economies. The risk would always remain that a cornered Iran might even attack the Gulf states directly, hitting their oil installations or disrupting transport lanes in the Persian Gulf. These countries want a nuclear deal, not a regional conflagration.

Meanwhile, Israel’s military hubris is becoming inadmissible to its Arab moderate allies. They wanted Israel as an equal partner in a regional peace, not as a new hegemon. Wisely, the Gulf states have in recent years reached out to Iran in quest of stability that would allow them to focus on their economies. Now they are in for years of uncertainty that can adversely affect their grand economic plans and the confidence of foreign investors.

The Middle East is at the threshold of a new chapter that calls for visionary leadership that is capable of thinking in grand diplomatic terms. This means bringing the war in Gaza to an end, opening a political horizon to the Palestinian nation, and extending the Abraham Peace Accords to Syria and Saudi Arabia. But if a new Middle East is what we want to build, Israel needs to assume the diplomatic wisdom that the Gulf States have shown in their rapprochement with Iran. An Israeli-Arab peace should not be a confrontational enterprise against Iran. It must be a step toward integrating Iran into a broader system of peace and security in the region. Iran’s rivals in the Middle East should not take its humiliation as the last destination of the historical process. Iran is a great nation with a formidable history and an extraordinary capacity for resurgence. It is up to its neighbours, Israelis and Arabs, to make it so that this would be a benign, rather than a malignant, comeback.

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The most impressive-looking bulls, the ones with the meanest-looking horns, are resting in the Corrales del Gas; the runners’ red-and-white outfits are looking pristine and perfectly pressed ahead of their use; the train and bus stations are a buzzing hive of visitors; hoteliers are rubbing their hands at the sky-high occupancy rates despite room prices that can reach €1,000 a night; bars and restaurants have stocked up on food and drinks ahead of a week of exhausting work. The historical city center is lined with wooden planks and posts; the gleaming bullring awaits the start of the festivities, and nerves are on edge.

This is the scene in Spain’s northern city of Pamplona ahead of the 2025 Sanfermines, a festival famously chronicled by Ernest Hemingway that draws thousands of visitors each year to what has sometimes been dubbed as the biggest party in the world and the mother of all Spanish fiestas. The capital of the history-rich region of Navarre will kick off events on Sunday with the traditional Chupinazo, a rocket fired from the balcony of City Hall to the delight of a chanting crowd packed in the square below and whose ebb and flow has been studied by scientists.

A conglomeration of 900 posts, 2,700 planks, 2,500 wedges and eight gates demarcate the 848.6-meter (half a mile) route that begins at Cuesta de Santo Domingo and ends at the bullring. There, every morning at 8 a.m. from July 7th to 14th, the bulls to be fought that afternoon will run from the pen to the ring among a crowd of young men and women who want to feel the thrill of risking their lives, or at least a good fall on the hard cobblestones. Between 200 and 300 people are typically injured each year, although in most cases the injuries are minor. There have been 15 fatalities since 1925.

Despite the appearance of anarchy, some basic rules must be followed to protect the physical safety of participants. The fence closes at 7:30, and by that time, law enforcement officers have already evacuated minors and anyone showing signs of having consumed alcohol or drugs. Objects that could obstruct the race, such as backpacks or cameras, are not allowed; touching or disturbing the bulls is prohibited, and in case of a fall, it is advisable not to get up and to protect your head.

Lack of symbols

The Sanfermines feature nine days of music, dancing and drinking in the streets, where hundreds of activities have been organized by the City Council, including exhibitions of Basque rural sports and parades of Gigantes y Cabezudos, papier-maché figures depicting giants and oversized heads. But the soul of the festivities lies in the figure of Saint Fermin, the patron saint of the city, and in the bulls themselves. Despite this, city officials have this year decided to showcase neither one in a promotional video that instead underscores the festival’s ability to bring people together, calling it “a time of encounters.”

Despite this, attention is geared toward the morning runs, which many people will witness from balconies along Cuesta de Santo Domingo, City Hall Square, Mercaderes and Estafeta streets; many more will get up early to watch the live coverage provided by Spain’s national broadcaster. Covering the distance takes around three minutes for six bulls chosen for that day’s bullfight, who are led by steers. Along with the animals, there are an average of 2,500 runners daily (which can balloon to 4,000 on weekends), of which only 6% are women.

Navarrese health authorities have established a team of nine stations at the foot of the fence, eight support points and more than 100 professionals, including doctors, nurses, technicians and other workers. There will also be 16 medical ambulances distributed throughout the route.

On Tuesday night, workers applied 1,500 liters of non-slip liquid in different areas of the run route, as they have been doing since 2005, to prevent the bulls from slipping, falling and fragmenting the herd. This treatment “increases the speed of the race and, ultimately, minimizes its danger,” according to the city.

Hotels starting at €500 a night

Hotels are welcoming guests at prices ranging from €500 to €1,000 per night, which has not prevented the Pamplona Hotel Association from estimating an average occupancy rate of 83.4%, higher than in 2024, rising to 90% on the days of peak demand, from July 6 to 9.

The city has published a leaflet containing basic recommendations “for a safe and civil festival.” It also emphasizes that Pamplona is a city with zero tolerance for sexist attacks and urges people to report them, in an unspoken reminder of a high-profile case involving a sexual assault in 2016 that made global headlines as the La Manada case and led to a national reckoning over the legal definition of sexual violence.

For the first time in the history of Pamplona’s bullring, a woman, the French rejoneadora Lea Vicens, is scheduled to participate in a bullfight on Sunday the 6th. Along with her, the other star will be the Peruvian bullfighter Roca Rey.

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