A Russian drone strike on a Ukrainian military ammunition depot in Myla, a village roughly 20 kilometers west of Kyiv, has killed 38 people, with four still missing as of Sunday, according to regional authorities. The depot's detonating shells, mines, and drones triggered secondary explosions that damaged more than 130 residential buildings, including a nearby retirement home for elderly and disabled residents.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has ordered a criminal investigation into what he called "terrible negligence" — the storage of ammunition near civilian homes in apparent violation of Ukrainian law. The dual nature of the disaster, a Russian strike compounded by domestic storage failures, marks a rare public reckoning inside a country fighting for its survival, and lands as Moscow's Defense Ministry signals a shift toward openly telegraphed strikes on Ukraine's energy grid.
Rescue operations continue amid rising toll
Regional officials, citing Kyiv regional head Tymur Tkachenko, said the exact number of care home residents among the dead has not been confirmed, though the retirement home sustained heavy damage in the blast. Taras Didych, head of the local Dmytrivska hromada, was killed while participating in rescue efforts. More than 380 residents, including 59 children, were evacuated from the area, and RFE/RL correspondents on the ground described the surrounding zone as being "in ruins." Zelenskyy's Sunday update put the injury count at 20, revised down from earlier figures of over 40 as authorities continued to reconcile casualty data.
The strike came at the tail end of a sustained Russian air campaign — Moscow's drone incursions have already tested NATO's eastern flank this year — with Ukrainian officials citing more than 28 continuous hours of air raid alerts across the Kyiv region between August 27 and 29, and at least 267 drones and two missiles launched in a single overnight wave.
Observers are reading: why Russia's energy infrastructure threat could compound Ukraine's storage failures into a winter crisis.
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Russia signals broader energy campaign
Russia's Defense Ministry announced Sunday it is "preparing massive strikes" against Ukraine's energy infrastructure, framing the move as retaliation for Kyiv's drone campaign against Russian oil refineries and logistics networks — Ukrainian forces reportedly struck Russian refineries at least 21 times in August alone, according to Bloomberg. The explicit public framing, rather than the ambiguity Moscow typically maintains around such threats, represents a notable departure. It arrives as Ukraine's Energy Ministry has already reported over 80 percent of the country's power generation facilities damaged or destroyed, and as the Ukrainian Air Force has stopped regularly reporting ballistic missile interception data since August 11 — a gap that complicates independent verification of the coming weeks.
Local residents in Myla told reporters they had not been informed of what the depot near their homes contained. As Kyiv's prosecutors, the SBU, and military command pursue the negligence probe, the country faces a strike pattern testing both its air defenses and its own institutional accountability at the same time.
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