I keep coming back to one detail from Tuesday’s strike on Kyiv: the men who died weren’t fighting anyone. They were railway workers, doing overnight repairs, when a ballistic missile hit their depot. Six of them didn’t make it. Across the wider attack on the city that night, at least 12 people were killed and a dozen wounded — three of them children.
That’s the kind of fact that’s easy to read past in a headline and hard to actually sit with.
Oleksandr Pertsovsky, who chairs Ukraine’s state railway company Ukrzaliznytsia, called it an unbearably difficult night for the whole railway family. Fair description. His crews were out there before sunrise, trying to get overhead lines working again while fires from the strike were still being put out.
I don’t think this is a coincidence, and neither do Ukrainian officials. This is what a targeted campaign looks like.
The scale of it is honestly hard to process. More than 1,500 strikes on the rail network this year. Hundreds of locomotives damaged. Hundreds of carriages, too. For a couple of months now, it’s been nearly nightly — several Shahed drones aimed at stations and track, night after night after night.
Why the railway specifically? A few reasons, and they compound. Ukrzaliznytsia isn’t a small operation — it’s one of Europe’s largest rail networks, employing something in the neighborhood of 170,000 people. During wartime, it’s carried an outsized load: Western military aid coming in, grain exports going out, refugees heading toward the border. Hit the railway hard enough and you’re not just disrupting trains. You’re touching the military supply chain, the economy, and civilian morale all at once.
Ukraine’s railway chief has been fairly blunt about the intent behind it, telling reporters that the first goal is panic among passengers and the second is damage to the broader economy. Given how much air defense is already stretched thin, that strategy has real teeth. Trains now stop the moment a drone gets within roughly 50 kilometers of the tracks — which sounds like a sensible precaution until you realize it means normal journeys can turn into 12- or 15-hour ordeals.
There’s a version of this war’s early history where Russia was thought to be somewhat careful with rail infrastructure — the idea being that captured lines might be useful for moving their own troops. If that was ever the calculation, it doesn’t look that way anymore. What’s happening now reads as deliberate, systematic, and aimed at breaking the network rather than preserving it.
Meanwhile, life in Kyiv adjusts around this. Sirens that don’t really stop. Officials describing waves of over 1,500 drones recently, roughly 800 of them the newer jet-fuel type that’s tougher to intercept — arriving at a pace of one or two an hour, around the clock. That’s just the texture of a day now.
And still, the trains run where they can. The line out to Przemyśl in Poland remains one of the main routes for people leaving — around six million Ukrainians have gone that way since 2022, mostly women and children.
What sticks with me most, honestly, is how fast the repairs happen. A depot gets hit, a line goes down, and within hours someone’s already out there stringing cable back up, clearing wreckage, coaxing the system back into motion. It won’t make the same headlines as a missile strike. But it might say more about where this war actually stands than anything else — a country that keeps running its trains, even as the tracks themselves have become the target.