A Russian drone strike on a warehouse on Kyiv’s western edge has killed at least 27 people, Ukrainian officials said, unleashing a towering blaze and a series of explosions that sent thick black smoke rolling over nearby suburbs.
Ukrainian prosecutors said the warehouse appeared to have held “explosive objects” and announced a criminal negligence investigation into how such materials were being stored.
Officials have not disclosed what type of facility it was.
The attack comes as Russia and Ukraine have escalated long-range strikes on each other in recent months — attacks that have ignited fires and driven civilian casualties to record levels.
AFP reporters described seeing a huge column of black smoke rising over the capital’s western suburbs while authorities said the site was still burning.
“Unfortunately, as things stand, 27 people are known to have died. And this figure may not be final,” Kyiv region governor Tymur Tkachenko said.
He added that Taras Didych, the mayor of the village of Dmytrivska, was among those killed.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said ammunition should not be kept close to residential areas, pointing to existing rules meant to prevent disasters of this kind.
“There are regulations in place – ammunition cannot be stored near homes or other residential areas. Appropriate conclusions will certainly be drawn,” Mr Zelensky wrote in a post on X.
Ukrainian prosecutors said they had opened an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the strike and the subsequent detonations.
“On 28 August at around 8:10pm, an unmanned aerial vehicle… fell on or struck the grounds of an enterprise in the town of Myla,” the office of Ukraine’s prosecutor general said.
Myla lies on Kyiv’s western outskirts.
“A large-scale fire broke out on the enterprise’s grounds, and detonation began,” the statement added.
The prosecutor’s office said investigators would examine “the legality of the… storage of explosive objects and materials on the enterprise’s grounds” and determine whether the unnamed company had the “necessary permits and approvals”.
Prime Minister Sergiy Koretsky said the latest deaths showed that hard lessons had still not been absorbed after a deadly July strike on a munitions depot in Vyshneve, near Kyiv.
That earlier investigation found serious shortcomings by a state-owned company that failed to follow standards despite nearby residential buildings.
“In the fifth year of the full-scale invasion, making the same mistakes over and over is criminal negligence,” he wrote on Telegram.
“Everyone responsible, without exception, must face severe punishment so that such situations never happen again.”
