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.

The minister called on international partners to tighten sanctions against Russia further and to provide financial assistance to the Ukrainian government so that it can procure more locomotives that are compatible with Ukraine's Soviet-era broad-gauge (1,520 millimeters or almost 5 feet).

"Ukraine's railway keeps the country moving," Sybiha said. "It enables the rapid evacuation of civilians from frontline areas, transports essential cargo, and keeps grain and other critical goods moving across the country."

Russia was specifically targeting locomotives because they were ideal from a technical point of view, said Vasyl Shevchenko, a former Ukrainian deputy transport minister. "A locomotive's thermal signature is very large, and almost impossible to miss," he told DW. "The impact of a strike can be devastating, because 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of explosives in a diesel locomotive can cause several metric tons of fuel to detonate and completely destroy it. A strike on an electric locomotive will cause a fire that can paralyze an entire stretch of track. That's why they are targeting areas where the loss of a single train can bring traffic to a standstill."