Unbearable pain
Within seconds of two Russian cruise missiles slamming into his Odesa apartment block on Saturday, Andriy Bespalov’s third-floor flat was engulfed in a fireball.
With the flames burning the clothes off his back, he fled to the balcony to escape the inferno and leapt on to a neighbour’s balcony on the floor below.
Despite his brush with death, the father of two, who now lies in an Odesa hospital ward with third-degree burns, considers himself lucky.
For in the apartment above him on the fourth floor, Valeria Glodan, her three-monthold baby Kira and mother Lyudmila Yavkina were killed instantly.
the Mail told the heartbreaking story of their tragic end on Monday. now we can reveal what happened to the family on the floor below.
to Andriy, a 43-year-old sailor, and his wife of two decades, Lyudmila, the apartment was their pride and joy, the home in which they had brought up their two boys, Pavel and igor, to become fine teenagers.
it is now nothing more than a scorched concrete void.
Dressed in a light blue and grey tracksuit, Lyudmila, a professional fitness instructor, rummages through a cupboard to see if anything has been left unscathed.
Gone are the sofas from where they would watch tV together, and the kitchen
‘I will suffer this pain later, not now’
From James Franey and photographer Mark Large
IN ODESA
where they planned to prepare their Easter Sunday meal is covered in a thick layer of ash.
‘i have no plans for now, apart from going to stay with my mother,’ says 40-year-old Lyudmila. ‘the most important thing is that my husband will be OK. i will suffer this pain later, not now.’
All that survived in her flat were some clothes, shoes and her cat Silver, who was found in a cupboard two days after the attack.
‘he has just eight lives now,’ she observes poignantly.
Much like the newly-widowed Yuri Glodan, who survived the blast that killed wife Valeria and his baby daughter because he had stepped out to go to the supermarket at the crucial moment, Lyudmila only managed to cheat death on that fateful day after deciding to run igor, 13, to a swimming training camp on the other side of Odesa.
As she speaks, a team of rescue workers sweep away the debris of once-prized household possessions through the large hole in the side of the 16-floor block created by the impact of the missiles.
Every few minutes, they shout warnings to the residents gathered below before throwing out blown-off doors, washing machines, or pieces of shattered glass.
A group of ten shattered workers taking a break for lunch can only sit and watch in stunned disbelief from the front courtyard.
the force of the blast left the block a crumbling mess with twisted steel rods sticking out from beneath the rubble.
the ceiling between the flats on the third and fourth floors was destroyed in the explosion and from Lyudmila Bespalova’s charred front room, you can peer into the flat above where three generations of Yuri’s family died.
‘Come with us. this is where we found them,’ says one Ukrainian rescue worker, dressed in orange overalls, in perfect English.
neighbour Oksana Boskaovsky describes Yuri’s motherin-law Lyudmila Yavkina as the typical doting grandmother, a keen cook and baker who idolised Yuri’s threemonth-old daughter.
‘For her, Valeria and Kira were her reasons for living,’ she says. ‘She loved them more than life itself.’ All three were innocent civilians looking to put aside the horrors of war for a few days as they celebrated Easter.
When the air raid sirens blared across Odesa just before 2pm on Saturday, they ran to the bathroom in the
‘Easter food lay covered in dust’
mistaken belief that they would be safe there.
But the walls of the bathroom were instantly turned to rubble by the explosion, crushing Lyudmila, Valeria, and tiny Kira to death.
When a devastated Yuri returned to the flat after his trip to the shops, he found the smashed bodies of his beloved wife and daughter strewn across the floor.