Author, Paul Adams
Place of work, BBC
Place of message, in Kyiv
Published 11 minutes ago
Reading time: 6 min
This is a translation of a BBC correspondent's report in English with minor changes. The original can be read here.
Since the full-scale Russian invasion, Ukrainian railways have helped the country live and fight. Now it’s becoming more and more difficult for them: this year, according to the state-owned company Ukrzaliznytsia, Russian drones have struck more locomotives than in the previous three years of the war.
Yulia Ponomarenko, 27, a marketing specialist from Kharkov, was traveling by train to Warsaw in September. The trip was suddenly interrupted just before the Polish border.
"The border guards started running and shouting: 'Run! Get out of the car! Shelling!' - recalls Yulia [hereinafter, direct speech is given in translation from the English translation - BBC Russian Service].
It turned out that a Russian drone hit a locomotive in the same area. Just minutes earlier, a special train carrying former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and national security advisers to the governments of leading European countries passed through this section.
Yulia and the rest of the passengers on her train had to wait for six hours while the fire was put out and the tracks cleared ahead.
“We were very lucky that we were only delayed for a short time and that it was not our train [that was hit by the drone],” she says.
More and more Ukrainian train passengers are now experiencing stoppages and long delays. Raids, due to which passengers are evacuated from carriages, also occur far in the rear.
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In September alone, passenger trains were evacuated 5,831 times due to Russian drones, as reported by AFP on October 5, citing the Ukrzaliznytsia company. That is, on average, 205 trains stopped every day.
The attacks on trains appear to be part of a broader campaign of attacks on Ukrainian transport infrastructure. In the past few days, Russian drones have struck, in particular, two bridges in Kyiv. A metro train was running along one of them.
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17-year-old Anastasia Rybalchenko survived a drone strike near a train. On September 16, at four o'clock in the morning, she and her fellow travelers had to run out of the Odessa-Kirovograd train.
“On the way to Odessa, we were evacuated many times, and then again, on the way back,” Anastasia said. “I already thought that if they announced an evacuation again, I wouldn’t be able to stand it anymore.”
An hour and a half later, as she and other passengers sat in the dark and waited, a drone struck nearby.
“There was a very loud explosion, and everyone ran into the forest,” recalls Anastasia.
It is unclear what target the drone was flying towards; it didn't hit the train. But more and more new explosions flashed in the sky, and Anastasia decided that she would not wait and would go on foot. It was already close to Kirovograd. She was then picked up by her parents.
“I won’t travel by train anymore!” - she declares.
Most passengers don't have to go through such dramatic moments as Anastasia's, but delays due to air raids - sometimes short, sometimes hours - have become commonplace.
Since the end of 2025, when Russian drones began attacking passenger trains on the move, Ukrainian passengers have become increasingly accustomed to these actions following the same pattern: getting off the train, scrolling through Telegram channels in search of new information about drones and missiles, sending messages to friends and family that the train is delayed.
For the Ukrzaliznytsia company, which prided itself on its punctuality, the disrupted schedule became a big problem.
“We used to say that even during the war we work better than the railways in some European countries in normal times,” says Alexander Pertsovsky, chairman of the board of Ukrzaliznytsia. “But now the most important thing is the lives of passengers and train crew members.”
The Russian Ministry of Defense claims that its military does not target civilians, but strikes the railway because it is used to transport military personnel and weapons.
The number of these attacks has increased sharply in recent months.
According to Ukrzaliznytsia estimates, since the beginning of the great war, 521 locomotives have been hit, and 60% of them this year. In 2025, there were 1,206 attacks on railway facilities, and this year there are already 1,700.
“This latest wave of escalation and the real war on the railway are becoming increasingly brutal,” Pertsovsky says. “It’s a combination of the killing power of their bombs and the precision they’ve achieved with cameras and distributed networks, so they can now hit moving targets.”
According to Pertsovsky, the latest Russian drones are equipped with AI elements and image recognition capabilities. Ukraine, for obvious reasons, does not talk about its methods of countering this threat, but it is clear that one of the most important ones is electronic warfare, which deprives drones of communication.
“Unfortunately, it’s a game of cat and mouse,” Pertsovsky says.
The BBC team, which rarely happens to journalists, was allowed to look at the underground bunker where employees of the Ukrzaliznytsia company monitor threats to trains and railway facilities in real time.
On one of the huge video screens, colorful passenger and freight trains were moving along the arteries of the gigantic network of Ukrainian railways. A Russian drone, indicated by a red icon, was flying over Kiev at that moment, just somewhere almost above us.
Each drone icon had a 100 km circle around it. Passengers on all trains that found themselves inside this circle should have already been evacuated, and they would not be allowed to return to the carriages until the train was outside the circle.
“Our job is to not allow our trains and our crew members to be in that immediate threat of attack,” Pertsovsky said.
Thanks to these precautions, there are relatively few casualties from Russian strikes. In 2026, according to Ukrzaliznytsia, eight of its workers were killed, six of them were killed by a ballistic missile strike on a locomotive depot in Kyiv.
When we were in the Ukrzaliznytsia bunker, air raid sirens sounded in Kyiv once again. We were told that the central station had been evacuated.
“We have probably become a little different railroads, reinvented railroads,” said Alexander Pertsovsky. “But we will not stop linking the country together, winter and summer, no matter what happens, no matter how the enemy hits us.”
With the participation of Anastasia Levchenko
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