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MYLA, Ukraine (AP) — 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 Ukrainian defenses 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.
The blasts rocked Myla, causing people to frantically seek cover.
“At about 8 p.m., 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 crews raced to get people to safety and extinguish blazes, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy 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.
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Kyiv investigates warehouse targeted in attack
In a social media post Saturday, Zelenskyy shed more light on the situation.
“The first strike was on an ammunition storage site that definitely shouldn’t have been there – a Defense Forces storage facility. Shells, mines, other ammunition, and drones detonated.”
Ukrainian Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi didn’t specify what was in the warehouse, but he 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.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said it hit a warehouse in Myla that was storing components and launch boosters for long-range drones. It also said it attacked the ports of Mykolaiv and Izmail, and a logistics center and warehouse facilities storing parts for Ukraine’s Flamingo cruise missiles in the Kyiv region.
Russian jet-powered drones pose a problem for Kyiv
Russian strikes damaged homes and apartment blocks in the southern Kherson region on Saturday, killing two people and wounding 27 more, including a child, Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the region administration, said in a statement.
Prokudin said earlier in the week that Russia had intensified its attacks on critical infrastructure in the region, which is about 70% under Russian control. He also urged tens of thousands of residents to move to safer regions because of the possibility of prolonged power and heating outages this winter.
Although officials haven’t said whether they were used in the warehouse attack, Russia has significantly increased its use of jet-powered drones, and their numbers will keep growing as Moscow sees their effectiveness, Pavlo Palisa, deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office, told reporters Friday.
“Means of attack always outpace means of defense. We will certainly need to adapt. It will take time,” Palisa said. He said interceptor drones currently available to Ukraine, which could theoretically intercept jet-powered drones, have not yet demonstrated the expected effectiveness, though Ukraine is working on solutions.
Ukraine vows to increase long-range strikes
Meanwhile, Ukraine has stepped up its long-range attacks on Russian military industries and energy facilities in recent months. The attacks, which use domestically made drones, are meant to cut into a source of Moscow’s war funding and make Russians feel the consequences.
In his evening statement to the nation Friday, Zelenskyy said Kyiv hoped to increase its long-range strikes to reach 1000 drone launches every day.
“Right now, we average over 300 of our long-range sanctions,” Zelenskyy said, his preferred term for Kyiv’s long-range attacks that have also lately targeted Russian large-scale online retailers. “There must be more. We have a very specific goal, and we will achieve it.”
Moscow’s forces destroyed 313 Ukrainian drones overnight, Russia’s Defense Ministry said Saturday.
Ukrainian drone attacks wounded 11 people in Russia’s Rostov region, Gov. Yuri Slyusar said. Writing on social media, he said that nine people were hospitalized, including four children.
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This story was updated to correct that 31 people, not 30, were killed in the July 2 attack on Kyiv.
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Davies reported from Manchester, England, and Yurchuk from Kyiv. Associated Press reporter Ignatius Ivlev-Yorke contributed to this report.