The family wiped out by Putin’s Easter massacre
Yuri went out to buy groceries at the nearby shop. He returned to find two Russian cruise missiles had slammed into his apartment block ... and his wife, baby daughter and mother-in-law dead in the rubble
SATURDAY should have been such a special day for Yuri Glodan, his wife Valeria, 28, and their precious three-month-old daughter Kira.
Yuri, a baker who had been working 13-hour shifts making Easter cakes, was enjoying his first day off in over a week.
He and his young family – who lived with Valeria’s mother, Lyudmila, at her flat in a 16-floor apartment building in Odessa – were making last-minute preparations for Orthodox Christian Easter Sunday, baby Kira’s first.
Just before 2.30pm, after a cheery ‘goodbye’ to Valeria, Yuri popped out to a nearby supermarket for more supplies. It was only a short walk. He should have been back home within minutes.
But shortly after he closed the door of the family’s flat, two Russian cruise missiles slammed into the third and fourth floors of the apartment block, destroying everything in their path, shattering masonry and windows and creating a huge ball of fire and smoke.
Yuri’s wife of nearly three years, their tiny child and his mother-inlaw were killed instantly. Three generations of his family gone.
‘My dear ones are in the Kingdom of Heaven,’ he wrote on Facebook yesterday. ‘You will be forever in our hearts.’
That he had managed to write anything at all is a miracle, given his devastating loss.
Yuri and Valeria had been together for seven years. They met while working in a local Italian resstruck.
‘Killing children is Russia’s new national idea’
From James Franey and photographer Mark Large
taurant, Tavernetta, and were married in August 2019.
When little Kira was born on January 4, weighing a healthy eight pounds and with bright blue eyes, they could barely contain their joy.
Valeria, a former brand manager originally from the city of Kherson, wrote on Instagram a few weeks ago: ‘These were the best 40 weeks [my pregnancy]. Our girl is one month old now. Daddy got her her first flowers. It’s a whole new level of happiness.’
She shared pictures of Kira feeding and laughing, and one of the baby’s teeny hands dwarfed by her own. Yuri was just as happy.
Those who know him say he’s ‘honest and hardworking’ – a simple guy who loved his family more than anything. He had everything he wanted. Until Putin’s missiles Yuri and his family were not alone in their tragedy, of course. At least eight people were killed in Saturday’s attacks, and at least another 18 injured.
All innocent Ukrainians simply looking to find some joy, some hope, in the celebration of Easter after weeks of war.
There were no military targets in that part of Odessa, despite Russia’s bogus claims.
No wonder Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky could barely contain his emotions as he vowed to find and punish those responsible. ‘It looks like killing children is Russia’s new national idea,’ he said at a press conference held in an underground metro station in the capital Kyiv.
‘The war started when this baby (Kira) was one month old,’ he added. ‘Can you imagine what is happening? They are just b ******* . I don’t have any other words for it, just b ******* .’
While horrors have unfolded elsewhere, the beautiful southern port of Odessa has largely been an oasis of calm, although it is high on Putin’s list of targets. Saturday’s atrocity came as a shock.
Only days earlier, soldiers had started dismantling anti-tank barriers as the city’s coffee shops and terraces began to slowly bustle once more as Easter preparations got underway.
Members of the rescue services should been with their own families over the weekend, painting eggs with the children, feasting, praying. But instead, firefighters were scrambling through the
scorched wreckage as residents gathered beyond the police security cordon, anxiously watching and waiting for news.
Other than the crunching and shattering of glass beneath their feet and the disposal of debris from the crater-sized hole where the walls of the apartment building once stood, it was eerily quiet.
Those at the front could just about make out a few solitary items of clothing buried in the rubble.
One young woman, Nastya Paradovski, and her father Alexey manage to brush past the police officers as the emergency services emerged from the wreckage with a box of possessions. ‘My documents!’ the 21-year-old shouted out as she recognised what looked to be a badly scorched Ukrainian passport. It lay amongst other pieces of charred paper and a hoard of mobile phones, splattered in dust, that had somehow survived the searing temperatures of a double explosion so forceful that it destroyed many cars in a nearby car park. In the courtyard, wellwishers were laying red carnations and toys to honour those who passed away.
Nastya had only returned home to Odessa from Poland on Saturday, mistakenly thinking that her hometown would be safe from Russian attacks.
Her father Alexey cheated death only because he’d left to collect her from the railway station at the crucial time.
What carnage they returned home to – bodies, rubble, the emergency services and desperate residents scrambling to recover pieces of their lives from the devastation.
It was particularly poignant for Nastya’s grandfather, 73-year-old Alexander Paradovski.
A former builder who’d actually helped construct the apartment block years ago, he had lived in it ever since.
‘I was in the kitchen painting eggs for the holiday when the first missile struck,’ he said. ‘It was the only room that wasn’t completely destroyed.’
His grandson, also known as Alexey, had been in the bathroom. Both were pulled from the remains of their third-floor flat several hours after the attack.
Mr Paradovski somehow escaped unscathed, but the fierce flames from the explosions and the shattering glass had burned and sliced into Alexey’s skin.
‘I heard people on the second floor below me crying and screaming for help,’ the grandfather-oftwo said. ‘I will leave for Bucharest now. It is not safe here anymore.’
Alex Reutskiy, a local logistics manager, described how he ‘felt the earth move’ after watching the two missile hit the block of flats from his balcony just 500 metres away. He said that he will stay in Odessa ‘for as long as I can’ despite Putin’s threat to annex the entire southern coast of Ukraine. ‘It is incredible. One afternoon he mur
‘I heard people screaming and crying for help’
ders a three-month-old child, then he posts a video in the evening showing himself in church,’ said Mr Reutskiy, referring to the Russian president’s own celebration of Easter.
‘Putin has managed what no Ukrainian president has ever done. He has united all the Ukrainian people with these acts of terror.’
Meanwhile, Yuri Glodan remains in deep shock. His friends say he is ‘totally destroyed’ at losing the love of his life.
But of course he is. He must feel there is nothing left. His wife and daughter gone. The baby’s grandmother gone too. No home, no belongings, no hope. Now only memories remain.
Memories of how he and Valeria met and fell in love. Of marrying and honeymooning in Rome. Of making their home here in Odessa with her mother. And then, earlier this year, welcoming baby Kira into the world with such joy.
Until at exactly 2.30pm on Saturday, as they prepared for their first Easter as a new family. And then it all turned to dust.