María Senovilla: "A humanitarian crisis is about to break out due to lack of food in some places that have been occupied by the Russians"

In the latest episode of "De cara al mundo", on Onda Madrid, we had the participation of María Senovilla, journalist, special envoy to Ukraine and collaborator of Atalayar, who as every Friday analyses the progress and the situation in Ukraine, especially in Kharkov, the city she has left behind, in Odessa, the city where she is, and in Lyman, where the last mass graves are being discovered.

Where are you now? I think you've had a bit of a difficult journey and you're also without electricity after the bombings.

Busy, indeed. I'm in the city of Odessa, although it was quite an ordeal to get out of Kharkov because a few hours before I took my train there was another bombing. As you said, more than 60 missiles have been fired, and half the country is now without electricity.

The truth is that in Kharkov this attack started already on Wednesday night, when there was an apparently inconsequential bombing, but the next day the city centre was bombed, including one of the missiles that fell very close to the railway tracks. At first it was announced that there would be delays and there was even a possibility that the trains would not leave. In the end, I did manage to catch a train to Odessa and found when I arrived that I had travelled in the middle of this new massive attack on several Ukrainian cities.

Russia has attacked cities such as Dnipro, the capital Kiev, but also Kharkov, Poltava and Odessa. Here, on my arrival, I also found a "black out", there is no electricity, we don't know when it will be restored and the situation gets more complicated every time there is a new bombardment because there are infrastructures that have not been repaired before. There is less and less Ukrainian infrastructure left standing.

We knew a few days ago that one of the shipments that was going to be sent by the European Union and the United States was precisely that, 150 electrical installations to try to help the Ukrainians to have electricity. How is the morale of the people? How do you live without electricity, without heating and without Internet?  

It's complicated. In addition to the United States and its power plants, Spain is also sending generators, mainly for hospitals and these kinds of public buildings. Then remember that we are talking about three Turkish ships that are supposed to be stationed soon in the Black Sea to supply electricity precisely to Odessa.  

It is difficult to live like this. People have got used to it and are adapting. They work in cafes, we go to petrol stations, to gas stations to get to work. The invincibility points are working. There are generators there so you can go and charge your device and make yourself a hot coffee. Even so, people are calm, they are resigned, they don't give up, but I will say that it's very complicated day-to-day life like this, and even more so in the middle of winter with the cold temperatures that are being recorded, imagine the houses without heating. It is not easy. 

Have more mass graves and more torture rooms been discovered as you go forward in those cities that have been taken back by the Ukrainians? Are you discovering what some units of the Russian troops have been doing?

Yes, they are. In Kherson they are being investigated. I recently had the opportunity to go to the town of Lyman and there they found two common burial sites. One of them had more than 100 civilian corpses, most of them had died during the heavy shelling that besieged that town in Donetsk, but there was also another mass grave with military personnel, more than thirty. The authorities did not want to give me any details because the investigation is secret for the moment and is ongoing, but everything points to the fact that it will be like in other places and they will be corpses with signs of torture, as we have already seen in Izium. Manacled, executed, mutilated corpses. In Kherson, I think it's going to be more of the same. It is a constant in every city that has been occupied by Russian troops: new mass graves are discovered, new torture chambers and new evidence of war crimes that I hope sooner rather than later will get somewhere and someone will pay for it.

I was reading you these days in Atalayar in a report precisely from Liman, you just mentioned it, and the headline is tremendous: "In Lyman we have been starving".

That's right, both the city of Lyman and the whole region are dedicated to agriculture and livestock farming. A food exporting city, a food exporting city, it is also a very important railway junction because all the agri-food products leave from there to be exported both to the rest of Ukraine and to the rest of the countries, including the European Union. It used to be a food exporting city where now they are starving.

What I saw there was absolute desolation. People queuing to get the only food a day that volunteers brought from the city of Kramatorsk, more than 40 kilometres away, because there is no electricity there except in public buildings. There is no heating, people can't cook, but there is not even food, there is no supply, food shops, supermarkets, grocery shops are not open. Nothing is arriving, and you see people with haggard faces and need written all over them.

They are being offered the possibility of evacuation because Liman is still very close to the front line, very close to Bakhmut, and very close to Kreminna. It's very difficult to get that food supply back from other points and it's very difficult to get it back to normal because they're bombing very close. So imagine the people who didn't want to leave, which was already less than 20% of the population, but how are those people going to get through the winter?

There is about to be a humanitarian crisis because of lack of food in some places that have been occupied by the Russians. That is the reality right now in some parts of Ukraine.