Death toll rises to 38 in Myla ammunition depot strike as residents ask why weapons were stored near homes

A week after a Russian jet-powered drone struck an ammunition dump in the village of Myla, 15 miles outside central Kyiv, the death toll has climbed to 38, with four people still missing. The attack on the night of 15-16 September also destroyed or damaged dozens of homes and sparked a wave of anger among survivors who say they were never told explosives were stored in their midst.

Volodymyr, a 61-year-old security guard, showed journalists from The Guardian around his family’s property on 31 August. The roof had been blown off, windows shattered, and a greenhouse destroyed. Despite the devastation, he found two surviving bunches of grapes to offer. His neighbour Vira, 65, was blunt: “Those who set up the depot here are to blame. There are people here, this is a village. You can’t keep something like that here.”

The initial blast at about 8pm triggered a chain of 30 to 50 secondary explosions that lasted roughly six hours. Serhii, Vira’s son, said he and his mother hid in a small bunker. He told the Guardian he had assumed the storage facility held humanitarian aid. After the explosions, he found a Grad rocket shell, several mines and cluster munition fragments on their land.

The incident raises uncomfortable questions for Ukraine’s military leadership about the siting of ammunition depots in populated areas. Although the war has forced the military to disperse stockpiles to reduce the risk of catastrophic loss in a single strike, storing live munitions near villages appears to have been an acceptable risk until now. Residents of Myla say they received no warning and no explanation.

The attack on Myla was not the only drone strike in the Kyiv region that night. In the Sviatoshynskyi district of the capital, a separate Russian jet-powered drone hit a warehouse used by Kvartal 95 – the production company founded by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy before he entered politics. According to Ukrainska Pravda, the warehouse held props, costumes and sets accumulated over 20 years of concerts, films and TV shows. No one was injured, but the studio said in a statement: “Behind every set, costume or prop are the work of our team, filming, rehearsals and dozens of stories that we created together with our audience.” The symbolic targeting of a site linked to the president is consistent with Russia’s broader pattern of striking cultural and civilian infrastructure, though militarily it had little value.

Civilian casualties from drone attacks continue across Ukraine. On 1 September, a 43-year-old employee of a municipal utility company was killed by a Russian drone in the Korabelnyi district of Kherson. Ukrainska Pravda reported, citing local officials Oleksandr Prokudin and Yaroslav Shanko, that the man was taken to hospital in critical condition but died of his wounds. The attack occurred at around midday, a reminder that Russian drones now pose a threat at any hour.

Taken together, the Myla depot strike, the destruction of the Kvartal 95 warehouse, and the Kherson utility worker’s death illustrate a broader pattern: Russia is systematically targeting not just military installations but also the everyday fabric of Ukrainian life – homes, cultural memory, municipal workers. For Kyiv’s military planners, the Myla disaster will force a hard look at logistics. The question residents are asking – why put a depot beside a village – will not go away until it is answered publicly and compensation is organised.