The order came in the dark and it was simple: leave the train, move away from the carriages, walk towards the lake. Katerina Sergatskova, a journalist on the Kyiv to Warsaw service, did what she was told, and then she stood outside in the open for several hours with the other passengers. “We were told to evacuate immediately, but there was no shelter,” she told the Kyiv Independent. “We were simply told to move away from the train cars toward the lake.” She had seen Russian drones hit a petrol station and the locomotive of her own train, close to the Yahodyn crossing point on the border between Ukraine and Poland.
The train was about two kilometres from Polish territory when the drone hit, according to Ukrzaliznytsia, the Ukrainian state railway company. Nobody on board was hurt. All 206 passengers were evacuated in time. The Polish railway operator PKP said it had taken over the train.
Later in the day, the story changed shape. Ukrzaliznytsia said that, shortly before the locomotive was hit, a diplomatic train had been standing at Yahodyn station. On board were security advisers from several EU countries and former European leaders, including the former British prime minister Boris Johnson. In another train at the station at the moment of the attack was David Petraeus, the former director of the CIA. The railway company said it was quite possible that the diplomatic train had been the real target, because it had passed along the same line a short time earlier. On that train, the railway said, were Johnson, the former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt, Petraeus and other senior European security figures. Russia admitted that it had attacked railway infrastructure in western Ukraine.
The German magazine Der Spiegel described what happened inside that other train. Günter Sautter, one of the closest advisers to the German chancellor Friedrich Merz, was travelling from Kyiv to Poland during the night of 12 to 13 September. At about five in the morning the train stopped near the Polish border. Conductors woke the passengers and prepared them to leave, and some got off because of the drone strikes. Then came the all clear: no more drones had been detected, and the evacuation was stopped. Sautter had been in Kyiv with security advisers from the United Kingdom, France and Italy, and with representatives of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government, to discuss possible peace talks with Russia. A drone had set fire to a petrol station and several lorries about 800 metres from the crossing point.
Polish officials said that the drones had not crossed into Polish airspace, and Ukraine’s border service said the Yahodyn crossing point itself had not been hit. Even so, Warsaw treated the night as serious. The Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski wrote on social media that Putin was escalating, and Prime Minister Donald Tusk called a crisis meeting for the afternoon. Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, said this was Putin’s terror knocking directly on the doors of the EU and NATO.
There is a simple reason why so many important people were on the same railway line that night. Ukraine’s airspace is closed, so Western politicians who travel to Kyiv depend on the train from Poland.
The train was only one part of a much larger night. Russian drones attacked the Volyn and Rivne regions, which is rare for western Ukraine. Strikes hit two big steel plants, killing two people and injuring six. Across the country, attacks killed 11 people and injured 96.
Estonia’s foreign minister, Margus Tsahkna, posted a video of the burning petrol station, filmed a few hundred metres from the European Union. Only hours earlier, he wrote, members of his own team had been stuck at that same border crossing, unable to leave Ukraine because of the drones. “Our response must intensify too,” he added.