World News
Thirty four of the thirty seven killed near Kyiv were care home residents
By Staff Writer | 30 August 2026
A drone struck a depot at Myla on Friday evening and set off a detonation that reached a care home and about fifty houses. Prosecutors are examining whether the explosives were lawfully stored there.
At least 37 people were killed at Myla, a town on the western edge of Kyiv, after a drone struck the grounds of an enterprise there at about ten past eight on Friday evening. The strike started a fire and the fire reached whatever the site was holding. The office of the prosecutor general said a large scale blaze broke out on the grounds and that detonation began. Thirty four of the dead were residents of a care home for elderly and disabled people, according to the head of the regional military administration, Tymur Tkachenko, who put the number of damaged residential buildings at about fifty.
What has made this a matter for Ukrainian prosecutors rather than only for air defence is the second explosion. Investigators have opened proceedings and said their inquiry will look at the lawfulness of storing explosive objects and materials on the grounds, and at whether the owner held the permits and approvals required. Officials have not said whether the enterprise was military or civilian, and they have not named who owns it.
Those who allowed this to happen must be held accountable for their decisions
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine
The second inquiry of its kind in two months
In July an ammunition depot at Vyshneve, another Kyiv suburb, was hit and 22 people were killed, again with detonations and fires that reached houses nearby. That investigation established that a state owned company had not observed the rules on how close such storage may sit to homes, and the President said afterwards that two officials of state owned companies, one of them the country's largest arms producer, had allowed weapons to be kept on the site unlawfully and would answer for it.
In the fifth year of the full-scale invasion, making the same mistakes over and over is criminal negligence
Serhii Koretskyi, Prime Minister of Ukraine
Two separate strikes on two sites in eight weeks, each producing a secondary explosion that killed people who lived nearby, is a siting and licensing question as much as a wartime one. Separation distances between explosive storage and dwellings exist in peacetime codes for exactly this reason, and a war does not suspend them.
A third day of near constant attack
The strike came in the middle of an air campaign against Kyiv that had by Saturday run for three days almost without pause, through daylight as well as at night. Ukrainian officials describe a pattern in which stocks are built up and then spent in concentrated waves, with the object of wearing down the interceptors rather than defeating them outright. The Russian Ministry of Defence said it had hit a warehouse at Myla holding components and launch boosters for long range drones, and that it had also struck the ports of Mykolaiv and Izmail. It said it destroyed 313 Ukrainian drones overnight.
Hundreds of people were moved out of the area around Myla while the fire was brought under control. In the southern Kherson region on Saturday, two people were killed and 27 wounded, one of them a child, and the head of the regional administration there, Oleksandr Prokudin, has been urging tens of thousands of residents to move to safer parts of the country ahead of a winter in which heat and power may be interrupted for long periods.
Deputy head of the presidential office Pavlo Palisa told journalists on Friday that jet powered drones are being used in growing numbers and that the interceptors currently available have not yet performed as expected against them. He said means of attack always run ahead of means of defence and that adapting would take time. The President, in his own address on Friday evening, said the country was averaging more than 300 long range launches a day against targets inside Russia and intended to reach a thousand.