Russian strike on warehouse near Kyiv kills at least 37

At least 37 people have been killed after a Russian drone struck a warehouse near Kyiv’s western suburbs which appears to have been 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 Ukrainian capital. The regional governor, Tymur Tkachenko, said a further 42 people, including four children, had been injured after the Russian drone strike.

More than 370 people have been evacuated from the area, and the evacuation process is still continuing, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said.

In a statement, he said that a warehouse in the town of Myla had been struck “followed by a detonation”. He did not give details, but wrote in the same message that criminal proceedings had been opened on charges of official negligence.

“There are regulations in place – ammunition cannot be stored near homes or other residential areas,” Zelenskyy said.

“As of now, 27 people have been reported killed. One of those killed was the head of the Dmytrivka community, Taras Didych. He was rescuing people,” he added.

Ukrainian prosecutors said that after an unmanned aerial vehicle hit the grounds of an enterprise in Myla, “a large-scale fire broke out … and detonation began”. They have opened an investigation into the legality of the “storage of explosive objects and materials” on the enterprise’s grounds.

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.

Smoke rises from a fire at a large warehouse

“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 that it had hit a warehouse in Myla storing components and launch boosters for long-range drones. It also said that it had 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.

The Guardian wp:paragraph