Bucha warehouse strike death toll rises to 37 as Zelenskyy opens a negligence case

The death toll from Friday night's strike on a warehouse in Myla, in Kyiv Oblast's Bucha district, rose to at least 37 on Saturday. Tymur Tkachenko, head of the regional military administration, said at least 50 residential buildings were damaged and that the fire spread to homes and a restaurant. Earlier Saturday he had put the dead at 27 and the injured at 42, including four children.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said a warehouse in the village was hit, "followed by a detonation." He wrote that a care home for elderly people and people with disabilities was among the damaged buildings, and that more than 370 people had been evacuated with the operation still running. He also said prosecutors had opened a case for official negligence.

"There are regulations in place. Ammunition cannot be stored near homes or other residential areas," Zelenskyy said. He did not name the firm that occupied the warehouse. Russia's Ministry of Defence said it had struck a site in Myla that held components and launch boosters for long-range drones. It also claimed hits on the ports of Mykolaiv and Izmail and on facilities tied to Ukraine's Flamingo cruise missile.

Two files, one crater

Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office timed the original hit at about 20:10 on 28 August. An unmanned aircraft struck or crashed on a business compound. A fire followed. Then came the detonations that closed the M-06 Kyiv-Chop highway between kilometres 15 and 32 and turned a warehouse fire into an all-night emergency west of the capital.

Early local counts were small: five injured by 23:09, one house destroyed, seven damaged, a fire engine and a care home hit. Tkachenko confirmed fatalities after 02:20. Saturday morning's 27 dead became Saturday afternoon's 37. He has said the number may still move as crews take the site apart.

The legal file has two tracks. One is the attack. The other is the decision to keep energetic material next to houses, a restaurant and a care home. Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi pointed to an earlier blast in nearby Vyshneve this month, when an ammunition depot fire killed 22. He said that event had not been treated as a lesson.

Who died in the first hours

Among those killed was Taras Didych, head of the Dmytrivka hromada, who was one of the first officials on the scene. Forty-two people were injured in the first official count, four of them children, with seven admitted to hospital. Three hundred and eighty-one people, including 59 children, were listed as evacuated from the emergency zone before Zelenskyy's later figure of more than 370.

Bucha district is already attached to the first months of the 2022 invasion. This incident is a different kind of record: a rear-area warehouse whose contents, once ignited, did more damage than the incoming drone alone. That is why the negligence case exists. It will not undo the strike. It will decide whether Ukrainian officials share blame for how far the blast travelled once the drone arrived.

Emergency crews were still working on Saturday. Secondary detonations make rubble searches slow. The State Emergency Service has spent the week telling residents not to walk toward an active fire. Curiosity around a scene like Myla is how extra civilians die.

Western officials said this month that Russia is losing about 6,000 more troops a month than it can recruit, even at an intake near 1,000 a day. That manpower gap does not stop long-range drones. The Myla strike is a reminder that a single warehouse in the Kyiv belt can still produce a death toll that would lead a European bulletin on its own.