Ukraine steps up measures to protect railways

Recent months have seen a rise in Russian drone attacks on locomotives, stations, and infrastructure. More than 1,600 attacks were reported in the first eight months of 2026, according to Oleh Holovashchenko from Ukrzaliznytsia, the state rail operator.

On September 16, a train traveling between the capital Kyiv and Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine was struck by a Russian drone. The day before, another train in the Volhynia region was attacked near the Polish border.

Two days earlier, a drone had struck the locomotive of a passenger train at the Yahodyn border crossing, just two kilometers (1.2 miles) from Polish territory. Nobody was injured, as Ukrzaliznytsia's monitoring system had previously detected the drone and the train had been evacuated about 15 minutes before the attack. At the time, CIA Director David Petraeus was on another train at the same station.

A separate train carrying several former European leaders, including ex-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and security advisers had stopped at the station earlier the same day. The Ukrainian authorities believe that this diplomatic train was the drone's actual target, but the train departed earlier than scheduled.

Russia has damaged or destroyed more than 500 Ukrainian locomotives since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022. More than half of these attacks happened this year, according to a post on the social media platform X by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha. He said that part of "Putin's terror" was to destabilize Ukraine's logistics system.

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