A Russian jet-powered drone smashed into an ammunition warehouse in Myla, a village 15 miles outside central Kyiv, and the death toll rose to 38 on Sunday as four more people remained missing. The blast turned a quiet place into a scene of fire, flying debris and a long search for the dead.
For Volodymyr, the damage was immediate and personal. His family home lost its roof and its back windows, and he said he had been coming back and forth for two days to look at the ashes. The family was left without electricity and without water after Thursday night’s bombing, a reminder that the strike did not stop at the warehouse site itself.
The numbers underline how severe the explosion was. Thirty of the dead were from a care home close to the ammunition store, where the blast and the fires that followed spread across the area. Witnesses said 30 to 50 explosions continued for about six hours after the initial hit at 8pm, making the aftermath as dangerous as the strike itself.
The anger in Myla is not just about what was hit, but where it was kept. Vira said those who set up the depot there were to blame, adding that there are people here and that this is a village where something like that should not have been kept. Serhii said he thought the stored material was humanitarian aid, yet once the explosions eased, a missile shell from a Grad rocket launcher, several mines and cluster munitions were found on their property. That is the sharpest contradiction in the story: a place that some believed held aid was also holding explosive weapons.
The location of the store is now under criminal inquiry by Ukraine’s intelligence service, which means investigators are likely to examine how the material was placed so close to homes and what safety rules, if any, were ignored. The question matters because the village setting made the blast harder to contain, and because the attack is not being treated as an isolated event; there have been other Russian bombings of poorly placed ammunition dumps in recent weeks.
Cleanup crews were still working after the strike, but even that was interrupted when emergency services halted clear-up work at lunchtime because of another drone threat above. For Myla, that leaves a grim balance sheet: a warehouse site reduced to wreckage, homes damaged nearby, four people still missing and a community still waiting for the missing to be found.
