OMM Redaksiyası
Russian drone attacks are increasingly disrupting passenger rail services across Ukraine, with trains halted and evacuated after air raid alerts, according to the BBC.
Yuliia Ponomarenko, a 27-year-old marketing specialist from Kharkiv, said her journey to Warsaw was interrupted near the Polish border last month after a drone struck a locomotive nearby. Passengers on her train waited for six hours as firefighters dealt with the blaze and the line was cleared.
“We were really lucky that we were delayed a little and it wasn’t our train,” she said. A special train carrying former British prime minister Boris Johnson and other European dignitaries had passed through the area minutes before the strike.
Ukraine’s state-owned railway operator, “Ukrzaliznytsia”, told AFP that 5,831 trains were evacuated because of Russian drone attacks in September, an average of 205 trains a day.
Seventeen-year-old Anastasiia Ryvbalchenko said she and other passengers were ordered off a train at about 4 a.m. on 16 September, during a journey from Odesa to Kirovohrad. An hour and a half later, while they were waiting in darkness, a drone struck nearby.
“There was an extremely loud explosion and everyone started running into the woods,” she said. The train was not damaged, but Ryvbalchenko continued on foot before her parents picked her up. She said she did not plan to travel by train again.
According to “Ukrzaliznytsia” figures, nearly 60% of the 521 locomotives hit since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022 were struck this year. Attacks on railway facilities have increased from 1,206 in 2025 to 1,700 so far this year.
“Ukrzaliznytsia” chief Oleksandr Pertsovskyi said the latest escalation had made the threat to railways particularly severe. He said some Russian drones were equipped with artificial intelligence and image-recognition tools, enabling them to target moving trains.
Railway staff monitor threats from an underground command centre in Kyiv. When a drone is detected, passenger trains within a 100-kilometre radius are evacuated and passengers cannot return until the train is outside the area and the drone is moving away, Pertsovskyi said.
The operator reported that eight of its employees had been killed this year, including six in a ballistic missile strike on a locomotive depot in Kyiv. The company is preparing winter evacuation packs, mobile shelters and bus services for areas where evacuations are frequent, as temperatures could fall to minus 20C or lower.
Russia’s defence ministry denies targeting Ukrainian civilians and says strikes on railway infrastructure are aimed at facilities used to transport military personnel and equipment.
