The instruction came in the dark, and it was simple: get off the train, move away from the carriages, walk toward the lake. Katerina Sergatskova, a journalist travelling on the Kyiv to Warsaw service, did as she was told, and then 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 watched Russian drones hit a filling station and the locomotive of her own train near the Yahodyn crossing point on the Ukrainian border with Poland.
The train was about two kilometres from Polish territory when the drone struck, according to Ukrzaliznytsia, the Ukrainian state railway operator. Nobody on board was hurt. All 206 passengers were evacuated in time. The Polish railway operator PKP said it had taken over the train.
Only later that day did it become clear who else had been on that stretch of line, and the incident stopped looking like an attack on an ordinary passenger train. “Shortly before the locomotive was hit at the Ukrainian-Polish border, a diplomatic train was at Yagodyn station,” Ukrzaliznytsia said in a statement. “There were, among others, security advisers from several EU member states and former European leaders on board, including former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. In another train that was at Yagodyn station at the very moment of the attack was former CIA Director David Petraeus”. The railway company went further, saying it was quite possible that the diplomatic train had been the intended target, since it had passed along the same line shortly before. On board, it said, were Johnson, the former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt, Petraeus and other senior European security figures. Russia, for its part, admitted that it had attacked railway infrastructure in western Ukraine.
The German weekly Der Spiegel described what happened inside that other train. Günter Sautter, one of the closest advisers to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, was travelling from Kyiv to Poland on the night of 12 to 13 September. At around five in the morning the train stopped near the Polish border. Conductors woke the passengers and prepared them to leave, and some were taken off because of the drone strikes in the border area. Then came the all clear: no further drones had been detected, and the evacuation did not go ahead. Bildt, writing on X, also described passengers being told to evacuate. Sautter had been in the Ukrainian capital with security advisers from the United Kingdom, France and Italy and with representatives of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government, discussing possible peace negotiations with Russia. A drone had set fire to a filling station and several lorries about 800 metres from the Yahodyn to Dorohusk crossing point.
Estonia’s foreign minister, Margus Tsahkna, posted video of the burning petrol station. His own staff had been at that crossing not long before. “Only hours before these images emerged, members of my own team were stuck at this very border crossing, unable to leave Ukraine because of the Russian drone threat,” he wrote.
Within hours, exactly what had been hit became a matter of careful detail. Dariusz Sinecki, spokesperson for the Nadbużański Border Guard Unit in Poland, said a drone had struck a lorry near the Yahodyn to Dorohusk crossing that night. Andrii Demchenko, spokesperson for Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service, said the Yahodyn crossing point itself had not been hit. Polish Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz said Polish airspace had not been violated. None of that stopped Warsaw treating the night as extremely serious. “Putin escalates,” Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski wrote on social media, and Prime Minister Donald Tusk called a crisis team together for the afternoon. Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, was blunter. “This is (Vladimir) Putin’s terror, ‘knocking’ directly on the doors of the EU and NATO. Russian barbarians are at your gate, dear partners,” he said.
There is an unglamorous reason why a former British prime minister, a former CIA director and a chancellor’s security adviser were all on the same line on the same night. Ukraine’s airspace is closed, so Western politicians travelling to Kyiv depend on the rail link from Poland. Yahodyn is where that link physically changes shape: a border station opposite Dorohusk in Poland, used for passengers and freight, where the wheel sets under the carriages are exchanged. Ukrainian tracks are mostly broad gauge, 1520 mm wide, while Europe uses a standard gauge of 1435 mm, and because of that difference most Ukrainian trains simply cannot run west into Poland, Slovakia, Hungary or Romania.
The train was only one part of a much larger night. Russian drones targeted Volyn and Rivne oblasts in a rare mass attack on western Ukraine. Strikes hit two major Ukrainian steel plants, killing two people and injuring six. Across the country, attacks killed 11 and injured 96, with Odesa under mass overnight strike.
This time nothing crossed the border, and nobody died. What crossed was the message. Tsahkna, watching the petrol station burn in a video filmed a few hundred metres from the European Union, drew the conclusion he wanted others to draw: “Our response must intensify too. Every Russian missile and drone Ukraine stops, every Russian capability we help Ukraine destroy and every additional cost we impose on Moscow strengthens the security of Ukraine and all of Europe”.