‘The bread was in blood’: Grocery run ends man’s life in Ukraine’s Kharkiv

Victor Gubarev stepped out to purchase bread when he was killed by a fraction from a shell that landed in entrance of his residence block in Kharkiv on Monday, minutes earlier than his daughter arrived to search out an ambulance crew standing over his physique.

Crew members needed to maintain Yana Bachek again as they carried her father’s physique away following the blasts that hit the Soviet-era residence complicated the place they reside.

An English trainer, she stated she had been getting ready an internet lesson within the kitchen of her one-bedroom residence, shut by her mother and father’ flat, when the shelling began.

“I remember just the explosion,” she stated. “I just returned from shopping and crazy explosions, noise.”

Immediately her mom, Lyubov, referred to as, voice trembling, and stated her father had gone to purchase bread and was nonetheless exterior. Her associate, Yevgeniy, stopped her from dashing out right away in case there have been follow-up strikes, as there have been, seconds later.

The bread that Victor Gubarev, 79, was carrying when he was killed by shelling. (Photo: Reuters)

“I began to call him and there was no answer,” she stated.

When she pulled on her coat and went out a couple of minutes later, her anguished response to the sight of her father’s physique was caught by photographers who had arrived with the ambulances, shortly after the blasts.

“I am sorry. I want to forget it. The picture. The one picture I saw him,” Bachek stated.

Along with the mass graves of Bucha close to Kyiv or the destruction of the port metropolis of Mariupol, the indiscriminate shelling of cities like Kharkiv has come to represent what the Kremlin has referred to as its “special military operation” in Ukraine.

Russia says its incursion is meant to demilitarise and “denazify” Ukraine. Kyiv and its Western allies reject that as a false pretext for battle.

Russia denies focusing on civilians and rejects what Ukraine says is proof of atrocities, saying Ukraine has staged them to undermine peace talks.

Gubarev’s dying was one among a minimum of three on Monday in Kharkiv, which has been subjected to near-daily bombardment since Russia launched its invasion on Feb. 24.

A former driver who began working on the age of 16 and rose to turn out to be a automobile fleet supervisor for the oil firm Gazprom, the 79-year-old had been reluctant to go away due to well being issues he and his spouse suffered.

Sitting in her kitchen, often combating again tears, Bachek, their solely baby, shared household images displaying her father with an Elvis-style quiff on holidays by the Black Sea, beaming at Lyubov or swinging his granddaughter playfully in a buying bag.

Yana Bachek holds a photograph of her mom Luybov Gubareva and her father Victor Gubarev. (Photo: Reuters)

She described rising up in a middle-class household with out some huge cash in late Soviet Ukraine, learning onerous in school together with her mom, a piano trainer who loved concert events and theatre and her father who favored tinkering with vehicles and joking round along with his daughter.

“In his normal life, even in war, he tried to smile, to joke, to support us. He said to us: ‘You are my girls, my heroes’,” she stated.

Now she waits till her father could be buried however right here too the battle has imposed an extra agony because the sheer variety of useless has grown and regular funerals have turn out to be inconceivable.

“It’s not like we used to do – cemetery, grave, a special place where I can be separate from other people, to be calm, to speak, to cry, to put out the Easter cake,” she stated, referring to a Ukrainian memorial customized.

While the household waits for information, the loaf of bread Gubarev went out to purchase stays, nonetheless in its plastic wrapper, on a desk within the hallway, the place she touches it briefly every time she goes to the door.

“The bread was in blood,” she stated. “Now I can’t keep it in my hands, but I want to because it is a piece of my dad. It was the last thing he had in his hands.”