ON A TRAIN BETWEEN DNIPRO AND ODESA, Ukraine — Ukraine's trains keep running through near-daily drone threats, but passengers now evacuate again and again mid-journey. Beauty salon owner Antonina Viter, 36, told Reuters she is getting used to it: “Every third trip, we end up evacuating once, twice or even three times.”
Source: Reuters via KTWB
On the journey Reuters rode, the outward trip featured eight evacuations of roughly 30 minutes each, and the return journey one more, after Kyiv set new rules for rail passengers during air-raid alerts. Soon after Viter spoke, she was standing outside under a pitch-black October sky, wrapped in a blanket, waiting for the all-clear, Reuters reported.
The state operator Ukrzaliznytsia says Russia has attacked more than 1,700 rail facilities this year, including stations, locomotives and passenger wagons, Reuters reported. Russia says its targets are objects used by Kyiv's military. Both sides' claims are attributed as stated; Reuters did not independently verify the full count.
The escalation is corroborated by the industry press. Railway Gazette reported that Ukrainian government figures recorded more than 1,500 attacks on railway assets in the first eight months of 2026, and that more than 500 locomotives have been damaged or destroyed since the full-scale invasion began, more than half of them this year, according to Ukrzaliznytsia chief Oleksandr Pertsovskyi.
Pertsovskyi told rail leaders that moving trains — once assumed relatively safe — are now targets too, as improved targeting lets drones strike vehicles themselves, Railway Gazette reported. He pointed to a September drone strike on a passenger-train locomotive at Yahodyn, around 2 km from the Polish border, after the train was evacuated and nobody was injured.
Reuters said new Russian jet-powered drones that are hard to shoot down have attacked everything from shopping centres and filling stations to power plants and other critical infrastructure — and the railways, on which Ukraine has long relied, are no exception.
Rail is Ukraine's civilian lifeline — moving passengers, freight and military supplies in the war's fifth year. Repeated evacuations and strikes on moving trains mean longer journeys and higher risk for ordinary travellers, even far from the front line.