The Spaniard Mario García has been in Ukraine for seven years enrolled in the guerrilla and does not intend to leave the country, despite the pleas of his family
He was an official in the Valencia City Council, but when the Crimean crisis broke out in 2014 he asked for early retirement and made his backpack to start a new life far removed from the previous one, and not only geographically: he traveled to Ukraine and became a collaborator guerrilla fighter, the only Spaniard who moves on the front, he says. Tomorrow he plans a new trip to the area most affected by the conflict, the Donbass basin, to bring material to soldiers, hospitals and families who have lived in terror for seven years.
“We are not going with the objective of entering into combat, but if it arises we will have to defend ourselves,” says this 73-year-old Valencian, who was also asked to travel with Doctors Without Borders to Tanzania, but who chose Ukraine because of the stories he was told. his father about the children of the war and how they were welcomed in that country.
Now he does not plan to abandon his citizens, who welcomed him with open arms, despite the fact that his family in Spain constantly begs him to return. «Yesterday my sister called me and she asked me crying to come back, that I have already helped a lot, but I already told her no, that they do not suffer. I already knew what was coming, I am a war volunteer and I want to go to the end », he assures, convinced, despite the incomprehension of his brothers and brothers-in-law.
Messages from his family in Spain or from his friends in Kiev are useless, warning him that there have never been so many flights and that everyone who can is leaving the country, starting with the oligarchs. He is sure of his decision and that he wants to help fight “the warlord”, as he describes Russian President Vladimir Putin. And he warns that he not only wants to seize Ukraine, that “Moldova, Romania, Poland and all of Europe will come later.”
With your volunteer war veteran documentation you can enter and leave the conflict zone without problems. There he brings groceries and even toys for the children that different international organizations contribute and he is willing to do anything. He has even received several merit awards for his help in the war, in which he estimates that 15,000 Ukrainian soldiers have already died, “murdered, because they do not want a war, but it is as if they entered your house to take everything away from you,” he explains. .
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