‘I would have been here too’: 37 killed after Russian strike triggers ammunition depot blasts near Kyiv

‘Those potatoes cost me dearly’

Near what remains of the Citadel hotel, hromadske meets its owner, Andrii. The three-star hotel burned down after the strike, leaving little more than ruins. Reporters are not allowed inside because the damaged roof could collapse and unexploded ammunition may still be scattered around the property.

Andrii traveled about 1,000 kilometers to see the destruction for himself.

“The air raid alert began at around 8:30 p.m. When it all started, there were about 15 people in the basement, including our staff. After the second strike, everything descended into chaos,” he says. “People were evacuated from the shelter and made their way, running from cover to cover, to an underground passage.”

Andrii says residents knew some kind of facility operated in the village because unusual-looking vehicles regularly traveled to the site.

“What hit it and where exactly it hit - the relevant authorities will answer those questions,” he says. “I know one thing: there was an unauthorized operation there. Serious mistakes were made. Amateurs should not be handling things like this.”

After seeing the scale of the explosions, Andrii says he has little doubt about what was stored there.

“I can only guess, but they clearly weren’t storing potatoes there. Those potatoes cost me dearly.”

‘I was late’

It takes about 20 minutes to walk from the Kyiv-Zhytomyr highway to the street that suffered the worst damage. Along the way, residents are already repairing shattered roofs, collecting broken glass and fixing damaged fences.

At the intersection with Prorizna Street, hromadske meets Zhanna. On Friday evening, she was on her way home, where her husband was waiting for her. He was killed.

“My husband went down to the basement. A stranger who was driving by asked to shelter there with him, so they stayed there together. There was also a dog,” Zhanna says. “A shell hit the car, and they suffocated from the smoke. Everything was blown apart so badly that even now you can’t get close.”

“I was supposed to get home at 8 p.m., but I was late. Otherwise, I probably would have been here too.”

Zhanna says large trucks had been traveling to the warehouses since before Russia’s full-scale invasion, and residents had grown accustomed to seeing them. She says the trucks had previously been used to transport bottled water.

“The ammunition keeps exploding. It’s scattered everywhere - huge rockets, grenades, shell casings,” she says. “The big question is: why was all of this stored here? I don’t know who allowed warehouses like this to be built in such a densely populated area.”

Zhanna’s home stands across from the nursing home that suffered the heaviest losses. Its once-light walls are now blackened, the windows are blown out and the roof is gone.

At least 27 bodies wrapped in bags lie in the facility’s yard. State Emergency Service spokesperson Svitlana Vodolaha says that is how many people were killed there, though the final toll will only be known once identification is complete.

Farther down the street are the ruins of the warehouses. Little remains after the Russian drone strike and the explosions that followed, except ammunition and debris scattered across the surrounding area.

‘F***, there are a lot of emotions here’

Mark walks up to the nursing home, swearing as he takes in the destruction. He also lives on Prorizna Street, though his home was not as badly damaged.

Broken glass and pieces of metal are scattered across his yard, and a piece of ammunition crashed through the roof of the family’s three-story house. There are usually many children in the home, their toys still scattered around it. This time, Mark says, they were lucky.

“My father was here. He was injured,” Mark says. “F***, there are a lot of emotions here.”

“The main question is who is going to be held responsible for all of this. So far, it looks like everyone is just going through the motions: they come by, ask questions and write things down, but there are no concrete answers.”

At least 37 people were killed in the Russian strike and the secondary explosions that followed. Ukraine’s Security Service, or SBU, has opened a criminal investigation into the strike on the warehouses and the subsequent detonation of ammunition.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said those who allowed the ammunition to be stored there “must be held accountable for their decisions.”

“Ammunition cannot be stored next to homes or other residential buildings,” Zelenskyy said.

A similar tragedy occurred in July in Vyshneve, another town in Kyiv Oblast, where an explosion at an ammunition storage site killed seven people and injured 26 others.

Ukrainian law enforcement agencies opened a criminal investigation into that incident as well. Two executives of companies linked to Ukraine’s state-owned defense conglomerate Ukroboronprom were later taken into custody as part of the investigation.