Russian drone hits Kyiv-area depot and a chain of blasts kills 37

At about 8:10 p.m. on Friday, 28 August, a Russian drone struck a warehouse in Myla, a village five kilometres west of Kyiv on the Kyiv-Chop highway. The building held artillery shells, mines, drones and other munitions. Those stores then detonated for hours. By Saturday afternoon the Kyiv regional military administration put the death toll at 37. Forty-two people were injured, four of them children. More than 370 residents were evacuated. Four people were still listed as missing at 5 p.m. local time.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said the storage site should not have been there. In a video address he called the placement of explosives next to homes a case of terrible negligence and said those who allowed it would be held to account. Ukraine has regulations that forbid ammunition dumps in residential areas. The Prosecutor General's Office opened a case on whether the unnamed company that ran the site had the required permits.

Tymur Tkachenko, head of the Kyiv Oblast military administration, said at least 50 residential buildings were damaged. The fire spread to a restaurant and to homes. Local reporting later attributed to Tkachenko said 34 of the dead had lived in a care home for elderly and disabled people that sat near the warehouse. Among the dead was Taras Didych, head of the Dmytrivka community, which includes Myla. Officials said he had gone to the scene as a first responder.

Russia's Defence Ministry said its forces had hit a depot in Myla that stored components and launch boosters for FP-1 and FP-2 long-range unmanned aerial vehicles. The same statement said Russian forces also struck the ports of Mykolaiv and Izmail and a logistics site in the Kyiv region that, Moscow claimed, held parts for Ukraine's Flamingo cruise missiles. Reuters and AP treated those additional claims as unverified from the Ukrainian side.

The Myla blast is the second time in two months that a strike on a Kyiv-area munitions store has set off secondary explosions among civilians. Last month a similar hit in Vyshneve killed 10 people and damaged hundreds of houses. Zelensky referred to that earlier case when he ordered the new inquiry.

The attack landed on the second of three nights of near-continuous Russian drone and missile raids on the capital region. On Saturday morning a separate strike in the Boryspil district killed a 14-year-old girl, Tkachenko said. Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said a two-year-old girl died in the city after a downed drone fell. Those deaths are counted separately from the 37 in Myla.

Rescue crews were still working the site on Saturday. Interior Minister Ivan Vyhivskyi confirmed the four missing persons figure in the afternoon. Residents who returned to inspect houses described walls stripped to brick and yards of scorched earth. Liubov Pavlenko, 45, told the BBC that everything in her home was completely damaged. Nataliia Kuznietsova, a veterinarian at a clinic in the village, said she was at work when the first strike landed.

The legal question now sits with the prosecutor. The office said a drone fell on or struck the grounds of an enterprise in Myla, that a large fire followed, and that detonation began. Investigators will examine the legality of storing explosive objects on those grounds. Zelensky has already said the rules exist and that ammunition cannot sit next to homes. What the inquiry must establish is who approved the site, how long the stores had been there, and whether the Vyshneve case last month produced any change in practice.

For Kyiv's western belt the immediate problem is more practical. Hundreds of people need housing. A care home is gone. A highway village that had lived with the war at a distance now has a cratered industrial plot and a death toll that ranks among the highest in the capital region this year. Russia's campaign of nightly drones continues. Ukraine's air defences intercept many of them. The ones that get through matter most when they land on something that then explodes on its own.

The next public numbers will come from Tkachenko's office and from the interior ministry as the missing are found or confirmed dead. The negligence file will move more slowly. Zelensky has already framed the political point: the Russian drone started the fire, and the decision to park shells beside a care home decided how many people burned.