By Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost
Volodymyr is 61 and works security for his family's property outside Myla, a village fifteen miles from central Kyiv. A day and a half after a Russian jet-powered drone slammed into an ammunition warehouse there, he's walking visitors from his wrecked house — roof gone, windows blown in — toward the impact site three hundred meters off. His garden, like most Ukrainian gardens, doubled as a vegetable patch. The greenhouse is shattered. The vegetable rows are burned black. Still, he manages to find two surviving bunches of grapes and hands them over, according to The Guardian.
The strike killed at least 38 people, the latest in a string of Russian attacks on ammunition storage sites near populated areas. But in Myla, the anger isn't only aimed at Moscow. Residents are asking pointed questions about why military stockpiles were placed so near their homes in the first place — a decision made, presumably, for logistical reasons but paid for, when the missiles came, by civilians who had no say in it.
That local frustration lands against a wider backdrop. Fox News reports that U.S. oversight of billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine is drawing fresh scrutiny amid corruption investigations that have reached President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's inner circle, with more than two dozen federal agencies involved in tracking the money. [The two threads — battlefield vulnerability and accountability for the money meant to prevent it — are not formally connected in available reporting, but they sit uncomfortably close together for anyone trying to make sense of the war's third year.]
None of that answers Volodymyr's real question: why here. Nobody official has, either.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."