Russian rail attacks fail to cripple ‘Ukraine’s lifeline’

By Jonathan Landay

FASTIV, Ukraine (Reuters) – A barrage of missiles has brought the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine to the quiet, cherry-blooming town of Fastiv on vast farmlands hundreds of kilometers from the front lines.

The April 28 strike, which left two people injured, hit a power substation that feeds electricity to a group of railways that form a major hub for networks connecting central Europe, Russia and Asia.

Ukrainian officials said the damage was quickly repaired, and a Reuters visit last week revealed no lingering trace. Trains disembarked between Kyiv and the southern port of Odessa, and disembarked passengers at the station in Fastiv, a town of 45,000 people 75 km south of the capital.

Officials said the attack was part of an escalating Russian assault on infrastructure aimed in part at paralyzing rail shipments of Western-supplied weapons as well as reinforcements supporting Ukrainian forces fighting in the east and south.

So far, Moscow’s efforts have failed, making Ukraine’s state-owned railways a leading symbol of the country’s resilience.

“Our longest delay was less than an hour,” said Oleksandr Kamyshin, 37, a former investment banker who keeps trains running as chief executive of Railways, Ukraine’s largest employer.

“They didn’t hit a single military train.”

The Russian Defense Ministry said the missile strikes targeted Ukrainian railway facilities due to the use of trains to deliver foreign weapons to Ukrainian forces.

Ukrainian officials have said the railway system is being bombed not only because it is important for military supplies.

Deputy Infrastructure Minister Yury Vaskov said in an interview that Moscow’s goal “is to destroy critical infrastructure as much as possible for military, economic and social reasons.”

With Russian warships closing Black Sea ports, collapsing bridges and checkpoints blocking roads, and a fuel crisis pummeling trucks, Ukraine’s 22,000-kilometre (14,000-mile) route is the main lifeblood of a faltering economy and a passage to the outside world.

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Trains have evacuated millions of fleeing civilians to safer parts of the country or abroad.

They began to transport small shipments of grain to neighboring countries to get around the Russian naval blockade. Ukraine was the world’s fourth largest grain exporter in the 2020/21 season, and exports have been disrupted by the war, bringing global food chains to a standstill and helping fuel inflation worldwide.

Internally, trains dispense humanitarian aid and other cargo. Kamyshin said they made it possible to restart the AcelorMittal steel plant, in Kryvyi Rih, by bringing in workers and taking out the product. They carry wounded civilians into the hospital cars where MSF works.

He said that since the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, trains have distributed more than 140,000 tons of food and will deliver about 1 million kilograms of mail for the state postal service by mid-May.

Russian attacks on some of the 1,000 stations killed dozens of civilians, including dozens in an April attack on the station in the eastern city of Kramatorsk.

This did not deter passengers.

Daily passenger traffic has reached up to 200,000, Kamyshin said in an interview on Saturday, as he boarded a train across a bridge that was repaired after it was badly damaged during the failed Russian advance on Kyiv from the suburb of Irbin.

Kamyshin said the 230,000 railway employees did not stay home even though 122 people were killed and 155 injured while working and in their homes.

Moscow denies hitting civilian targets in what it calls a “special military operation” to disarm Ukraine and rid it of what it describes as Western-fueled anti-Russian nationalism. Ukraine and the West say Russia has launched an unjustified war of aggression.

Reuters was unable to independently verify the assertions of Kamyshin and other Ukrainian officials about their successes in keeping the railroad running in wartime.

“Life” in Ukraine

During the first four days of the Russian offensive, Helena Moskrewska, 56, the director of the Irbin station, said she helped evacuate about 1,000 people and take local developments across land lines to Kyiv. I took the documents and equipment home when it got too dangerous.

I was here when the Russians came to the station. “I didn’t want to see them eye to eye,” Moskrewska said.

A group of current and former railway executives in the United States and Europe formed the Ukraine Railways International Support Task Force in March to raise funds for protective equipment, first aid kits, and financial aid for railway employees.

“There are a lot of fundraising efforts everywhere for Ukraine, but none of it goes to rail,” said Jolene Molitoris, the former president of the US Federal Railroad who heads the group. “It is the lifeblood of the country.”

The group also aims to finance purchases of heavy machinery, railways and other equipment required by railways.

He is racing against Russian attacks, Kamyshin said, deploying teams of workers and dispatchers around the clock to repair tracks and reroute trains. “It’s all about hours, not days.”

He and his top lieutenants are constantly on the move, taking trains to inspect for damages and repairs across Ukraine, he said, adding, “Once it’s broken, we fix it.”

Kamyshin said his top priority is to redirect grain exports from Ukraine’s southern ports to Poland, Romania and the Baltic states to help revive the economy. He said that Russia would remain a threat even after what he described as its inevitable defeat.

“This crazy neighbor will stay with us,” he said. “No one knows when they will come back.”

(Additional reporting by Pavel Politiuk; Editing by Frances Kerry)