KYIV — A Russian drone struck a warehouse in the town of Myla late Friday and triggered a secondary detonation that killed 37 people, injured 42 and forced the evacuation of nearly 400 residents from the Bucha district west of the Ukrainian capital, regional officials said Saturday.

The blast damaged at least 50 residential buildings and a care home for elderly and disabled people, and drew both a criminal negligence investigation into what the depot was storing and a Russian claim that the site was a legitimate military target — the second time since July that a strike on a Kyiv-region warehouse has ignited stored munitions and killed civilians nearby.

What burned

Tymur Tkachenko, head of the Kyiv regional military administration, said on Telegram that the death toll from the strike on the Bucha district had risen to 37 by Saturday afternoon. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had earlier put the figure at 27 and named Taras Didych, head of the Dmytrivka community, as among the dead. "He was rescuing people," Zelenskyy said.

Four children were among the 42 injured, Tkachenko said, and more than 370 people had been evacuated from the surrounding area. Zelenskyy said more than 300 emergency service personnel had been deployed to Myla, where the fire spread from the warehouse to homes, a restaurant and "a care home for elderly people and people with disabilities."

Ukraine's Air Force said Russia had launched at least two missiles and 267 drones across the country overnight. Separate strikes on Saturday killed a 2-year-old in Kyiv's Obolonskyi district and a 14-year-old girl in the Boryspil district, Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko and Tkachenko said.

The negligence question

Zelenskyy said criminal proceedings had been opened on charges of official negligence, and Ukraine's prosecutor general's office said it would review the "legality of the storage of explosive objects and materials" near residential buildings and the "actions of officials who made the relevant decisions."

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

Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi drew a direct line to a July strike on a munitions depot in Vyshneve, near Kyiv, that killed 22 people. An investigation into that incident found that a state-owned company had failed to comply with rules on the proximity of residential buildings.

"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."

The Russian claim

Russia's Ministry of Defence said its forces had targeted "an ammunition depot" in Myla that stored "components and launch boosters for FP-1/FP-2 long-range unmanned aerial vehicles," and separately said it had hit facilities storing parts for Ukraine's Flamingo cruise missiles in the Kyiv region.

Moscow has cast strikes near Ukrainian population centers as attacks on military logistics, and the Ukrainian prosecutor general's office is now asking why explosive material was at the Myla site at all. Earlier Friday, the Associated Press reported that Ukrainian officials had not confirmed a separate Russian claim about striking a Flamingo-missile warehouse in the region and that the wire could not verify it. Guardian and BBC coverage of the Myla blast emphasized the civilian toll and the state's failure to enforce buffer zones around ammunition.

Search and rescue operations continued in Myla into Saturday evening, Tkachenko said. Ukrainian prosecutors said their probe will examine whether the unnamed company responsible for the site had the "necessary permits and approvals."