KYIV, UKRAINE – A Russian strike on the Bucha district on the outskirts of Ukraine’s capital Kyiv has left at least 27 civilians dead, Ukrainian officials confirmed Saturday, in an attack that has sparked accusations of official negligence over improper weapons storage near residential areas and triggered renewed escalation of hostilities amid the ongoing full-scale invasion.
Tymur Tkachenko, head of Kyiv’s regional military administration, announced that roughly 50 residential structures suffered damage in the strike, which ignited a large blaze that spread across multiple private homes and a local restaurant. In a public address following the attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed that the strike hit an ammunition warehouse in the village of Myla, resulting in a massive secondary detonation that extended damage to surrounding civilian infrastructure.
Zelenskyy noted that a care facility for elderly residents and people with disabilities, alongside multiple apartment blocks and private homes, were damaged in the blast. He added that criminal investigations into official negligence have already been launched, referencing longstanding regulations that prohibit storing ammunition in close proximity to residential communities. As of Saturday afternoon, more than 370 residents have been evacuated from affected areas, with evacuation operations continuing to move at-risk civilians to safer locations, according to the president.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi echoed Zelenskyy’s criticism of internal missteps, drawing a parallel to an earlier strike on an ammunition depot in the Kyiv suburb of Vyshneve earlier this month. That attack killed 22 people, set off massive secondary blazes, and destroyed dozens of nearby homes. “Unfortunately, the terrible tragedy in Vyshneve did not become a lesson,” Koretskyi said. “In the fifth year of a full-scale invasion, repeating the same mistakes is criminal negligence. All those guilty, without exception, must be severely punished so that such situations do not happen again.”
Russia’s Ministry of Defense issued its own confirmation of the strike, stating that the targeted warehouse in Myla was being used to store components and launch boosters for Ukrainian long-range attack drones. The Russian military added that it also carried out coordinated strikes on the Black Sea ports of Mykolaiv and Izmail, alongside a separate logistics center and ammunition warehouse storing parts for Ukraine’s Flamingo cruise missiles elsewhere in the Kyiv region.
The strike on Myla comes amid three consecutive days of near-constant air raids across Kyiv, which have choked the capital’s local economy and upended daily civilian life more than four and a half years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In additional violence across the country Saturday, separate Russian attacks in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region killed two civilians and wounded 27 others, including one child, regional administration head Oleksandr Prokudin confirmed. Prokudin added that multiple residential homes and apartment buildings suffered damage in the strikes. Earlier this week, Prokudin warned that Russia had sharply intensified its attacks on critical energy and civilian infrastructure across Kherson, roughly 70% of which remains under Russian occupation. He urged tens of thousands of remaining residents to relocate to safer parts of Ukraine, warning that the region could face prolonged power and heating outages through the coming winter months that put civilian lives at severe risk.