ON A TRAIN BETWEEN DNIPRO AND ODESA — Ukrainian passengers are now used to leaving their trains again and again in the dark as air-raid sirens sound, Reuters reported on Wednesday, as Russia's escalating drone and missile attacks make even an ordinary rail journey a stop-start ordeal.

Beauty salon owner Antonina Viter, 36, told Reuters she crosses the country by rail to keep her business going. 'Every third trip, we end up evacuating once, twice or even three times,' she said. 'What can you do? How else do you get to your client?'

Kyiv has set new rules for rail passengers during air-raid alerts, Reuters said. Soon after Viter spoke, she was standing outside under a pitch-black October sky, wrapped in a blanket, waiting for the all-clear.

On the roughly 400-kilometre (250-mile) journey between Dnipro in the southeast and Odesa on the Black Sea, Reuters counted eight evacuations of roughly 30 minutes each on the outward trip and one more on the return journey.

Ukraine's state rail operator, Ukrzaliznytsia, says Russia has attacked more than 1,700 rail facilities this year, including stations, locomotives and passenger wagons. Russia says its targets are objects used by Kyiv's military.

RocketNews, summarising the same escalation in rail attacks, reported that attacks on railway facilities rose from 1,206 incidents in 2025 to 1,700 so far this year, and that in September alone authorities carried out 5,831 train evacuations, averaging about 205 halted trains a day.

Reuters said new Russian jet-powered drones that are hard to shoot down have attacked shopping centres, filling stations, power plants and other critical infrastructure, and that the railways are no exception.

The danger is not only delay. Reuters noted that a drone strike on the Dnipro-Odesa line on August 13 killed two train drivers — a reminder, for passengers and crews, that the threat on the line is direct as well as disruptive.