"About 400,000 people live in starvation-like conditions in Ethiopia."
That wording travels between media around the world.
It is called "famine-like" because the UN does not reach the affected areas and therefore must express itself with a reservation.
And the figure of 400,000 has stood still for a long time on suspicion that the relief shipments will not arrive.
But to ball with numbers and expressions is difficult to grasp.
Instead, try to include the following sentence:
Starvation means that the body begins to consume itself.
The body eats from its interior to keep the brain alive.
First, the water disappears and that is why you lose weight quickly at the beginning of starvation.
Then the body eats the fat and it is when the subcutaneous fat is lost that even young people can become wrinkled.
Protein can be washed away for a while when the muscles are consumed and glucose is extracted when the skeleton is broken down.
Since last summer, mothers have flocked to hospitals in Tigray with their severely malnourished children.
But in many painful cases, small lives have ended before they have even begun.
According to the UN, the government Abiy Ahmed is blocking aid shipments to Tigray.
That is why there is talk of genocide through famine.
You kill the fish by emptying the whole river of water, as someone put it.
Mass arrest of tigers
On the other hand, trucks with relief shipments that actually entered the Tigray have disappeared, with drivers and everything.
We should not believe otherwise than that the TPLF is prepared to use the emergency aid for its soldiers instead of the people.
It is an army that has shown itself fully prepared to commit terrible abuses.
Right now, the eyes of the world are on the capital Addis Ababa.
Mass arrests of tigers are taking place there, where, among others, two Swedish citizens have been swept into the scales.
People's ethnicity is registered in workplaces and in apartment buildings.
Here it is possible to draw extremely unpleasant historical parallels.
There is no military solution to Ethiopia's civil war.
There are only disintegrations in the wake of the war.
And if the giant country Ethiopia falls, stability is risked in the whole of the Horn of Africa.
Negotiations then?
Abiy Ahmed has designated the Western media as his enemy and he buys weapons from Turkey and Iran.
He gets money from Saudi Arabia and China is his biggest trading partner.
West is not best for Abiy.
African solution
The diplomatic solution will instead bear an African signature, even if the West will do its best to steer from the back seat.
But the African Union must prove itself mature now.
Because when no one wants to give in, the inherent logic of war requires that one side begins to lose before proper negotiations can become relevant.
Or possibly that the situation becomes so strained that the leadership on both sides feel that support for them is starting to falter.
So it has to get worse before it gets better.
More hunger and more death then.
But the worse it gets and the longer it takes, the harder it becomes to reach reconciliation and keep the country together.
The clock is ticking for Ethiopia.