'Unreal': BC family loses home in devastating Ukraine bombing

A Ukrainian family now living in B.C. has learned they've lost everything they had left in their home country.

“When I found out that my house was damaged, badly damaged and that it belonged to my neighbor, I froze,” Marko Zolotarov told Global News. “I froze in shock, thinking it was unreal.”

“There was a time when people lost their homes to foreclosures and I was somehow preparing myself that this could happen to me.”

A Russian bomb believed to have hit a hospital in Zaporizhzhia burned several houses in the old Zolotarov neighborhood, killing a 17-year-old boy.

“I was 17 years old when I came to Canada and now he's gone,” Zolotarov said.

His neighbor Yaroslav Handiko was outside in the garden when he said he heard the missile. As training, he fell to the ground.

His wife Olha and their children were inside the house at that time.

“She says that in a second the force pushed the windows and paneling in and out of the house like a vacuum,” Olha Hindeko said.

The bomb was the KAB-500KR, a common weapon developed by the Soviet Air Force in the 1970s.

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Olha said that a missile passed through the side of their house, speared the refrigerator and crashed into the other end of the wall.

Miraculously, Olha and her children survived the blast.

While he said it was a traumatic event, Zolotarov said the bombing severed his only childhood connection to Ukraine.

“When the house was destroyed, it felt like a part of me was destroyed because it was a part of me,” he said.

“That location, that beautiful house, those memories.”

He said he was thankful he didn't lose a loved one.

“Where war numbs you to the death of people, your heart breaks again and again.”

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