Skip linksSkip to Content
play
Live
Navigation menu
  • News
    • Africa
    • Asia
    • US & Canada
    • Latin America
    • Europe
    • Asia Pacific
  • Middle East
  • Explained
  • Opinion
  • Sport
  • Video
    • Features
    • Economy
    • Human Rights
    • Climate Crisis
    • Investigations
    • Interactives
    • In Pictures
    • Science & Technology
    • Podcasts
play
Live
Navigation menu
  • Russia-Ukraine war
  • Photos: 'Horrific' attack on Kyiv
  • Opinion: Why peace talks are failing
  • The Kerch Bridge is 'doomed'
  • What’s behind Russia’s drone warfare?
  • A look at Kyiv’s most audacious attacks

In Pictures

Gallery|Russia-Ukraine war

Kharkiv tragedy: Ukrainian man, 79, killed while out to buy bread

Victor Gubarev’s daughter saw his lifeless body after a fateful journey to buy a loaf of bread.

Yana Bachek is consoled by her partner Yevgeniy Vlasenko
Yana Bachek is consoled by her partner Yevgeniy Vlasenko and her mother Lyubov Gubareva, as she mourns over the body of her father Victor Gubarev, 79. [Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters]
Published On 21 Apr 202221 Apr 2022
facebooktwitterwhatsappcopylink

Victor Gubarev stepped out to buy bread when he was killed by a fragment from a shell that landed in front of his apartment block in Kharkiv on Monday, minutes before his daughter arrived to find an ambulance crew standing over his body.

Crew members had to hold Yana Bachek back as they carried her father’s body away following the blasts that hit the Soviet-era apartment complex where they live.

An English teacher, she said she had been preparing an online lesson in the kitchen of her one-bedroom apartment, close by her parents’ flat, when the shelling started.

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

Immediately her mother, Lyubov, called, voice trembling, and said her father had gone to buy bread and was still outside. Her partner, Yevgeniy, stopped her from rushing out straight away in case there were follow-up strikes, as there were, seconds later.

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

When she pulled on her coat and went out a few minutes later, her anguished reaction to the sight of her father’s body 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 said.

Along with the mass graves of Bucha near Kyiv or the destruction of the port city of Mariupol, the indiscriminate shelling of cities like Kharkiv has come to symbolise what the Kremlin has called its “special military operation” in Ukraine.

Advertisement

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

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

Family photos

Gubarev’s death was one of at least three on Monday in Kharkiv, which has been subjected to near-daily bombardment since Russia launched its invasion on February 24.

A former driver who started working at the age of 16 and rose to become a vehicle fleet manager for the oil company Gazprom, the 79-year-old had been reluctant to leave because of health problems he and his wife suffered.

Sitting in her kitchen, occasionally fighting back tears, Bachek, their only child, shared family photos showing her father with an Elvis-style quiff on holidays by the Black Sea, beaming at Lyubov or swinging his granddaughter playfully in a shopping bag.

She described growing up in a middle-class family without a lot of money in late Soviet Ukraine, studying hard at school with her mother, a piano teacher who enjoyed concerts and theatre and her father who liked tinkering with cars and joking around 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 said.

Now she waits until her father can be buried but here too the war has imposed an additional agony as the sheer number of dead has grown and normal funerals have become impossible.

“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 said, referring to a Ukrainian memorial custom.

While the family waits for news, the loaf of bread Gubarev went out to buy remains, still in its plastic wrapper, on a table in the hallway, where she touches it briefly each time she goes to the door.

“The bread was in blood,” she said. “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.”

Yana Bachek is consoled by her partner Yevgeniy Vlasenko
Yana Bachek is consoled by her partner Yevgeniy Vlasenko as medical workers retrieve the body of her father. [Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters]
Advertisement
Medical workers and first responders retrieve the body of Victor Gubarev
Medical workers and first responders retrieve the body of Victor Gubarey. [Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters]
Yana Bachek mourns on the arms of a first responder
Yana Bachek mourns on the arms of a first responder, after her father Victor Gubarev, 79, was killed in Kharkiv. [Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters]
Yana Bachek sits in her family's apartment
Yana sits in her family's apartment, two days after her father Victor Gubarev, 79, was killed. "I remember just the explosion," she said. "I just returned from shopping and crazy explosions, noise." [Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters]
Yana Bachek holds a photo of her mother Luybov Gubareva
Yana Bachek holds a photo of her mother Luybov Gubareva and her father Victor Gubarev. [Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters]
The bread that Victor Gubarev, 79, was carrying
The bread that Victor Gubarev was carrying when he was killed by shelling in Kharkiv. [Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters]
Advertisement
Yana Bachek and her partner Yengeniy Vlasenko
Yana Bachek and her partner Yengeniy Vlasenko in her family's apartment. [Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters]


    • About Us
    • Code of Ethics
    • Terms and Conditions
    • EU/EEA Regulatory Notice
    • Privacy Policy
    • Cookie Policy
    • Cookie Preferences
    • Sitemap
    • Work for us
    • Contact Us
    • User Accounts Help
    • Advertise with us
    • Stay Connected
    • Newsletters
    • Channel Finder
    • TV Schedule
    • Podcasts
    • Submit a Tip
    • Al Jazeera Arabic
    • Al Jazeera English
    • Al Jazeera Investigative Unit
    • Al Jazeera Mubasher
    • Al Jazeera Documentary
    • Al Jazeera Balkans
    • AJ+
    • Al Jazeera Centre for Studies
    • Al Jazeera Media Institute
    • Learn Arabic
    • Al Jazeera Centre for Public Liberties & Human Rights
    • Al Jazeera Forum
    • Al Jazeera Hotel Partners

Follow Al Jazeera English:

  • facebook
  • twitter
  • youtube
  • instagram-colored-outline
  • rss
Al Jazeera Media Network logo
© 2025 Al Jazeera Media Network