“The morning the war started, I was in a hotel in Sloviansk.
A source had told me, late at night, that something was going to happen, and I stayed up waiting for Putin's speech.
As he finished giving it, the first explosions were heard”, with these words by María R. Sahuquillo begins the video that accompanies this news item.
It is a tour of the cities where the key events of the war in Ukraine have occurred, the conflict that has made this country one of the undisputed protagonists of the year 2022.
Sahuquillo is one of the 15 people that EL PAÍS has sent to cover the invasion launched by Russia on February 24.
Another of the special envoys is Luis de Vega, who arrived in kyiv on the 23rd. "I arrived without knowing that in a few hours, that night, the invasion would begin," he recounts in the video.
The reporter was also in Irpin, the city made famous by the destroyed bridge over which tens of thousands of people fled.
Many arrived in countries of the European Union previously passing through Lviv.
In the train station of that city was Cristian Segura, who would later also visit the one in Kramatorsk, where Russian missiles caused a massacre of civilians.
A horror not very different from that found by Jacobo García in Bucha, where the Russian withdrawal exposed the corpses of executed civilians on Jablonska street.
The Donbas: beginning and end of the war
Some of the most intense fighting of the war has taken place in the Donbas region.
Sahuquillo received in Zaporizhia many of the people fleeing Mariupol, a city in the Donetsk province devastated by Russia and which made headlines for the bombing of the maternity hospital and the siege of the Azovstal steel plant.
The journalist was also in Severodonetsk, another city devastated by Putin's bombs.
At the end of this 2022, the bloodiest fighting of the conflict takes place in Bakhmut, another city in Donbas.
In this video you can see:
The
most outstanding images
of the Ukraine war in 2022.
The
testimonies of four of the special envoys
of EL PAÍS to Ukraine.