A Ukrainian man who lost his wife, three-month-old daughter and mother-in-law in a rocket attack in Odessa over Easter weekend, said it was “hard to live”.
Yuriy Glodan was at the grocery store and heard an explosion on his way home, he told DailyExpertNews’s Sara Sidner.
“I immediately felt that something bad had happened. I tried to call my wife. She didn’t answer,” he said in translated comments.
When he arrived at his apartment building, which had been attacked, he and a bystander immediately tried to start clearing the rubble. Together with paramedics, they found the bodies of Glodan’s wife and her mother.
Officials told him to leave the crime scene amid fears of a building collapse, but he would not leave until he found his daughter’s body.
“It’s hard to live with this. My family was my whole life. I lived for them. When my baby came, I understood the meaning of life,” he said.
Glodan’s neighbor, 19-year-old Oleksiy Paradovsky, is in hospital after suffering burns to 20% of his body.
“I realized a rocket hit my house and I started burning,” he told Sidner. “I thought for another minute, and I would certainly turn to ashes.”
Shrapnel also had to be removed from his body. He prepared for the war to work on a commercial supply ship, but now he’s just lucky to be alive, he said.
Watch the report and read more about the two men here†