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The father of three-month-old Kira, who died in the Russian shelling of Odessa, told the BBC's Russian Service how he picked up the remaining belongings from the half-destroyed house after his family was killed. On the day of the shelling, Yuri Glodan left his apartment to go shopping. When he learned there had been explosions in the house, Yuri returned and asked the police to let him into the building. He found the bodies of his wife and her mother in the apartment. Later rescuers found the body of a three-month-old girl, Yuri's daughter.
The girl's father returned to his home to retrieve items important to him and other family members from the apartment: photo albums and notes. «Everything that's left there will be thrown away as garbage. But those things are very important to me, to our family, to her friends, to our friends. We had wonderful mutual friends, they'll appreciate all that stuff,» Yuri explained.
The couple have been together for nine years. According to Yuri, Odessa was his wife's favorite city, they often went sightseeing, admiring »every street, every little house, the beautiful sea.» «I just won't be able to find another person like her. Such a person can only be given by God once,» Yuri says of his wife Valeria.
Yuri told reporters how he himself was present at the birth of his daughter and cried tears of joy when she was born. «And now it's very hard for me to realize my little girl no longer exists. And my wife, my mother-in-law... The whole world in front of my eyes just died yesterday. It was killed by a Russian missile. And, unfortunately, my family is not the only one killed,» Yurysaid.
At the end of the conversation, he handed the journalists a bag with diapers, explaining, «I don't need it anymore... It's for children. Give it to a charity organization.»
On April 23, at least eight people were killed in the shelling of Odessa, including three generations of one family: a grandmother, a mother, and a three-month-old girl. In all, 213 children have been killed and another 389 wounded in Ukraine since the war began.
Russia continues its military invasion of Ukraine, launched by order of Vladimir Putin on February 24. Russian authorities call it a «special military operation» to protect people «from genocide.» All these days, Russia has been shelling not only military facilities but also residential areas in Ukraine, especially with cluster bombs, which pose a particular danger to civilians. At the same time, the Russian side still claims it is destroying only military infrastructure.