It was late at night when they came for Dmytro Shabanov, a security assistant in eastern Ukraine at the Special Monitoring Mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
His seizure from his home in the Luhansk region in April 2022 — weeks after Moscow's full-scale invasion — was part of a coordinated operation by pro-Russian forces who detained him and two other Ukrainian OSCE workers. Maksym Petrov, an interpreter, also was seized in the Luhansk region, while Vadym Golda, another security assistant, was detained in neighboring Donetsk.
