A Russian drone struck an ammunition storage facility in the village of Myla, in the Bucha district west of Kyiv, late on Friday. The detonation that followed killed at least 37 people, injured more than 40, and forced the evacuation of over 380 residents. Among the dead was the mayor of a nearby town.

The site held artillery shells, mines and drones. The blast destroyed homes around it, including a care facility for elderly and disabled people.

The unusual part is who is being blamed

President Volodymyr Zelensky’s response was directed not at Moscow but at his own side. He described the storage of explosives beside people’s homes as gross negligence, said criminal proceedings had been opened on charges of official negligence, and demanded that the findings be made public quickly.

Ukraine’s defence ministry followed with an instruction that everyone responsible for weapons storage conduct a full audit of where their stocks are held.

This is a striking thing for a government to do in the middle of a war. Ukrainian officials rarely acknowledge damage to military facilities at all, because confirming a hit tells the other side its targeting worked. Announcing an investigation into your own army’s storage practices does exactly that, and does it in public.

Why it happened twice

It was the second such incident in two months. In Vyshneve, also in the Kyiv region, a strike last month set off secondary explosions that killed ten people and damaged hundreds of houses.

The underlying problem is not mysterious, though it is uncomfortable. Ammunition needs to be close to the units and the transport links that use it, which in practice means near roads, rail and cities. Dispersing it across many small sites reduces the damage from any single strike but multiplies the number of places that must be guarded and supplied. Long-range drones have made every fixed site in the country reachable, so the old assumption that a rear-area depot is a safe depot no longer holds.

Munitions safety standards specify minimum distances between explosive stores and inhabited buildings, calculated from the quantity stored. Those distances are large. Meeting them requires land, and land near a capital is exactly what is scarce.

None of which makes the deaths acceptable. It explains how a rule gets bent, not why bending it was allowed to continue after Vyshneve.

The legal question underneath

Russia’s defence ministry said it had struck an ammunition depot, and an ammunition depot is a lawful military target. Ukraine does not dispute what the site was.

The law of armed conflict places obligations on both sides here, and they are worth separating. The attacker must weigh expected civilian harm against the military advantage — and a depot in a residential area is one where that harm is foreseeable. The defender has a separate duty to avoid placing military objectives inside or near densely populated areas, precisely so that civilians are not made into a shield by accident.

A failure by one side does not excuse a failure by the other. Zelensky’s public acknowledgement that his own forces got the second part wrong is, whatever else it is, an unusual piece of honesty from a government at war.

The wider assault

The strike came on the third consecutive day of heavy Russian air attacks on Kyiv and the surrounding region. Nine cities were hit in the preceding night’s barrage: a 78-year-old woman was killed in Zaporizhzhia, a postal worker died in Kharkiv when a delivery terminal was destroyed, and a daytime drone attack on a Kharkiv shopping centre killed another person.

Russia has been using more ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones, both of which are harder to intercept — which connects this to a shortage of air-defence interceptors that runs well beyond Ukraine.

Related: the interceptor shortage in Europe.

Sources

Reuters; BBC News; UPI; Associated Press; statements by President Zelensky and the Ukrainian Defence Ministry; Russian Ministry of Defence statement; Kyiv regional military administration.