Yuri Glodan, a soldier from Odessa, has died at the front. He joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces after his wife and daughter were killed in a Russian missile attack in April 2022. His story is that of a family completely erased by war.
Eight people died in that attack last year, in which Glodan narrowly escaped. He had just left home to go shopping when he heard the news of the explosion. He ran back and found his building on fire. When he arrived at her apartment, he found the bodies of her wife and her mother, who had been killed by a Russian missile that had torn apart the lower floors of the block. He later found the body of his daughter.
Kyra, three months old; her mother, Valeria, and grandmother Lyudmila: three lives from three generations erased in a moment by Russian imperialism. A year and a half later, the man who tried to avenge them and put an end to the occupation war has also died.
Yuri Glodan first fought in the Azov ranks, and then in the 3rd assault brigade. “Every resident of Odessa knows this family,” explains Alexander Yakovenko, co-owner of the Make My Cake project, in which Glodan worked as a baker, in the Ukrainian media Strana.
Glodan’s words on the BBC were an exponent a year and a half ago of the horror that Russia has caused in Ukraine. “The whole world just died before my eyes, killed by a Russian missile.” About her wife he said that “I simply can’t find another person like her. God can only give it once.” Regarding his daughter, he remembered “crying with happiness” when she was born – at the end of January, just a month before the start of the war – “and now it is very difficult for me to realize that my daughter is no longer here.”
In those early stages of the war, the death of three generations of the same family outraged Ukraine and caused a shock in Odessa. In his speech to Ukrainians that night, President Volodymyr Zelensky cried: “It seems that killing children is just a new national idea of ??the Russian Federation,” calling those who planned and carried out the attack “bastards.”
That day, true to its narrative, the Russian Ministry of Defense then limited itself to stating that in the Odessa region, “high-precision missiles disabled a logistics terminal at a military airfield where a large batch of foreign weapons was stored.”
“What is happening is a pain for my family, for our city, for Ukraine, it is a pain for all of civilization. I hope that our story helps stop this war,” he told journalist Caroline Davies after losing his family. . After the interview, she gave him the diapers she had at home: “I don’t need them anymore.” Shortly after she enlisted. Glodan has not been able to see the end of the war: he died in the same war as his family. There is no one left in the Glodan house.
Before the large-scale invasion, Yuri Glodan worked as a baker and pastry chef at a restaurant company in Odessa. In 2022, he passed the selection process for the unit he wanted to join. “It is very painful to lose your brothers, and it is not pleasant to realize that instead it could have been you, and that you could be next,” he explained to the Odesian media outlet VGorode.
As reported by his partner Yakovenko, Yuri’s body was identified by a cross he was wearing.
Russian aviation destroyed a missile warehouse this Sunday in the Ukrainian region of Dnipropetrovsk, in the center of the country, Reuters reported.
It seems the response to an attack carried out the day before with Ukrainian long-range missiles against a shipyard in the annexed Crimea and which caused damage to a Russian missile ship. Ukraine launched 15 cruise missiles on the Russian shipyard in the port city of Kerch in occupied Crimea on Saturday, damaging a ship. The Russian Defense Ministry itself reported this attack, which could further undermine Moscow’s offensive capabilities. Thirteen of the missiles were destroyed in the air, while one hit a ship, Moscow said, which did not name the ship. Sergei Aksyonov, the Russian-installed head of Crimea, added that there were no casualties in Saturday’s attack on the Kerch shipyard.
President Zelensky – who is trying these days to address reports of stagnation and division in the Ukrainian military – took the opportunity to point out that Kiev’s greater ability to attack warships and diminish Russian options in the Black Sea have undermined efforts Russia’s war-makers and have helped Ukraine secure a transportation route to export its grain.