Russia targets Ukraine ammunition warehouse in deadliest strike this year

Myla, Ukraine: A Russian drone struck a warehouse west of Kyiv that Ukrainian officials say was storing shells, mines and other ammunition, sparking massive explosions and fires that swept through dozens of nearby homes and buildings and killing 37 people.

The Friday night attack on the warehouse in Myla, a village in the Bucha district, was the war’s deadliest attack this year and came on the second of three days of nearly round-the-clock Russian strikes that have severely disrupted life in and around the Ukrainian capital.

Attacks on the capital and, to a lesser extent, the rest of Ukraine have been nearly constant since Thursday. Kyiv officials say Russia builds up missile stocks and launches major attacks every few days, hoping to exhaust defences through the sheer weight of numbers.

The warehouse strike sparked fires that raced through homes and damaged at least 50 residential buildings, said Tymur Tkachenko, who heads the local regional military administration.

He was later cited by local media as saying 34 of the people killed were residents of a care home for elderly and disabled people. More than 370 people were evacuated.

“At about 8pm, the drone hit a warehouse somewhere, and then the detonation began,” Oleksandr Vodolaz, a village resident, told the Associated Press. “No one knew that weapons were stored there.”

Another local, Zhanna Kravchuk, said she had so many questions about what happened. “Why are weapons like this ... in warehouses and not on the front lines where they would help?” she said.

As emergency crews raced to get people to safety and extinguish blazes, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described the attack as a “terrible situation” and said it appeared to be the result of “terrible negligence on the part of those who stored explosives right next to people”.

He noted that Ukrainian law forbids the storage of ammunition close to people’s homes and said criminal proceedings had been opened. “Those who allowed this to happen must be held accountable for their decisions,” the president said.

In a social media post on Saturday, Zelensky shed more light on the situation.

“The first strike was on an ammunition storage site that definitely shouldn’t have been – a Defence Forces storage facility. Shells, mines, other ammunition, and drones detonated.”

Ukrainian Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi didn’t specify what was in the warehouse, but referenced a July attack on the Kyiv suburb of Vyshneve that struck an ammunition depot, killing 22 people and triggering detonations and fires that tore through nearby homes.

“Unfortunately, we can already see that the terrible tragedy in Vyshneve did not become a lesson,” Koretskyi said. “In the fifth year of a full-scale invasion, making the same mistakes is criminal negligence. And all those guilty, without exception, must be severely punished so that such situations do not happen again.”

The 37 killed surpassed the 31 who died in a July 2 strike on Kyiv, which had been the war’s deadliest attack of 2026.