A Ukrainian man who lost his wife, 3-month-old daughter and mother-in-law in a missile strike on Easter weekend in Odesa said that “it is hard to live.”
Yuriy Glodan was at the grocery store and heard an explosion on the way home, he told CNN’s Sara Sidner.
“I felt immediately something bad had happened. I tried to call my wife. She did not answer,” he said in translated remarks.
When he arrived to his apartment building, which had been struck, he and a bystander immediately tried to start clearing rubble. They, alongside EMS staff, found the bodies of Glodan’s wife and her mother.
Officials told him to leave the scene because there was fear of a building collapse, but he wouldn’t leave until he found the body of his baby daughter.
“It is hard to live with this. My family was my whole life. I lived for their sake. When my baby came along, I understood the meaning of life,” he said.
Glodan’s neighbor, 19-year-old Oleksiy Paradovsky, is in the hospital after suffering burns to 20% of his body.
“I realized that a rocket had hit my place and I started to burn,” he told Sidner. “I thought another minute, and I would definitely turn into ash.”
Shrapnel also had to be removed from his body. He was preparing to work on a commercial supply ship prior to the war, but now he’s just lucky to be alive, he said.
Watch the report and read more about the two men here: