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-month-old baby Kira and mother Lyudmila Yavkina were killed instantly.
The Mail told the heart-breaking 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.
Destruction: What is left of Lyudmila Yavkina’s fourth-floor apartment. The apartment belonged to the mother-in-law of Yuri Glodan, and is where his wife, Valeria, three-month-old daughter Kira and mother in law, Lyudmila, were killed when a Russian missile hit their residential apartment building in Odesa, Ukraine. Pictured: The bedroom
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 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.
Valeria was a new mother, her baby daughter Kira was just three month old. Russia took away their lives when its rocket hit a residential building in 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.
A Russian missile strike hit the apartment building in a residential area of the Black Sea city of Odesa
Neighbour Oksana Boskaovsky describes Yuri’s mother-in-law Lyudmila Yavkina as the typical doting grandmother, a keen cook and baker who idolised Yuri’s three-month-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 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.
Wreckage: Lyudmila Bespalova in her charred apartment
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.
Yesterday mementoes of their final moments together still lay scattered amid the debris that covered the flat’s tiled floors.
A box of Kyiv Easter chocolates, a pair of Valeria’s leather shoes, and a woman’s blue and pink nightgown lay covered in dust.
In the kitchen, a fridge door had been blown ajar to reveal the collection of red and white wines that the Glodans had planned to share over dinner on Sunday.
As two more rescue workers sift through the scene of destruction, the curtains from Lyudmila’s front room flutter in the wind. Her bedroom, where Yuri and Valeria had spent the previous night with baby Kira sleeping safely beside them in a small carry cot, has been completely upended.
Her books and parts of the ceiling are now strewn across the floor. The three of them are set to be buried later today and they were not the only victims, of course.
Mila and Bogdan Chernetskaya who were expecting their first baby, were also killed in the attack
Two of Lyudmila Yavkina’s fourth floor neighbours, athlete Mila Chernetskaya and her husband Bogdan, could only be identified as the latest victims of Putin’s barbaric attack on Odesa’s civilian population as late as yesterday.
They had only just moved to the apartment block and, adding to the heartbreak, Mila was pregnant their first child.
A week before his death, Bogdan had told his sister that he and his wife were expecting a baby. ‘My dear and sweet girl. What a wonderful, bright, and kind family you were.
‘You were expecting a baby and life was just beginning,’ Mila’s friend Veronika Kas wrote on social media.
Only the previous day, the bodies of another young couple with everything to live for had been recovered two days after the missiles hit.
Mila, 28, and her 21-year-old husband had only been married since August last year. Bogdan’s sister Yana wrote on Instagram: ‘But I have so many questions. ‘Why did this happen on this particular day?
‘I really hope I have kids, two of them. I will name them Mila and Bogdan.’