At least 37 people have been killed after a Russian drone struck a warehouse near Kyiv’s western suburbs that was storing “explosive objects”.
The attack damaged at least 50 residential buildings, including a care home for elderly and disabled people, and sparked a huge fire and explosions in the Bucha district of the Kyiv region. The regional governor, Tymur Tkachenko, said a further 42 people, including four children, had been injured in the strike.
More than 370 people have been evacuated from the area and the evacuation process was continuing, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said. In a statement, he said a warehouse in the town of Myla had been struck, “followed by a detonation”.
The warehouse was a depot owned by the Ukrainian military and stored shells, drones and other munitions, he said in a video address. “The first impact was on a place where ammunition was being stored that absolutely should not have been there – a depot of the defence forces. [There was] detonation of shells, mines, other munitions and drones on a significant scale,” Zelenskyy said.
Criminal proceedings had been opened on charges of official negligence, he added.
“There are regulations in place; ammunition cannot be stored near homes or other residential areas.”
He said one of the people killed was the head of the Dmytrivka community, Taras Didych, who died while rescuing others.
Ukrainian prosecutors said they had opened an investigation into the legality of the “storage of explosive objects and materials”.
The Ukrainian prime minister, Serhii Koretskyi, expressed regret that mistakes had not been learned from a previous deadly strike on a munitions depot in Vyshneve, near Kyiv, in July.
An investigation into that incident, in which 22 people were killed and fires tore through nearby homes, revealed serious failings on the part of a state-owned company, which did not comply with regulations on the proximity of residential buildings.
“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.”
In a statement, Russia’s ministry of defence said it had hit a warehouse in Myla storing components and launch boosters for long-range drones. It said it had also attacked the ports of Mykolaiv and Izmail, as well as a logistics centre and warehouse facilities storing parts for Ukraine’s Flamingo cruise missiles in the Kyiv region.
Elsewhere, Russian attacks across Ukraine’s southern Kherson region killed two people and wounded 27 more on Saturday, including a child, a local official said.
