The instruction came in the dark and it was not complicated: get off, get 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 she stood outside in the open for several hours with the rest of the 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 the 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 its locomotive, Ukrzaliznytsia, the Ukrainian state railway operator, reported. Nobody on board was hurt. All 206 passengers were evacuated in time. Polish railway operator PKP said it had taken over the train.
It was only later in the day that the passenger list of the traffic around it became public, and the incident stopped looking like an attack on a train and started looking like something else. “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 through the same stretch of line shortly before the train that was actually hit. On board, according to the railway, were Johnson, former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt, Petraeus and other senior European security figures. Russia, for its part, acknowledged that it had carried out an offensive against railway infrastructure in western Ukraine.
The German weekly Der Spiegel filled in 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 for evacuation, and some were taken off because of the drone strikes in the border area. Then the all clear came: no further drones had been detected, and the evacuation did not go ahead. Bildt, writing on X, described passengers being instructed to evacuate. Sautter had been in the Ukrainian capital together with security advisers from the United Kingdom, France and Italy and representatives of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government, discussing possible peace negotiations with Russia. He was, according to Der Spiegel, on his way back from those talks about a possible resumption of peace contacts with Moscow. A drone had set fire to a filling station and several lorries some 800 metres from the Yahodyn to Dorohusk crossing point.
Estonia’s foreign minister, Margus Tsahkna, posted video of the burning petrol station. His own people 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.
What was hit and what was not became, within hours, a matter of some precision. 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 there had been no violation of Polish airspace. None of which stopped Warsaw treating it as an event of the first order. “Putin escalates,” Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski wrote on social media, and Prime Minister Donald Tusk convened a crisis team 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.
The reason 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 is unglamorous. 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 station on the border opposite Dorohusk in Poland, used for passengers and freight, where bogies are exchanged. The line itself, Chełm to Kovel, runs 85 kilometres and is double track, carrying one standard gauge of 1435 mm and one broad gauge of 1520 mm, so that tracks of different widths cross into the neighbouring country. In Ukraine the broad gauge predominates, but the European standard gauge reaches as far as Kovel. Because of that difference in gauges, most Ukrainian rolling stock simply cannot run west into Poland, Slovakia, Hungary or Romania.
The train was one strand of a much larger night. Russian drones targeted Volyn and Rivne oblasts in a rare mass attack on western Ukraine. Russian 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, while in the Black Sea a Ukrainian naval drone destroyed a Russian unmanned boat, the Navy said.
Everyone reaching for the significance of a drone landing two kilometres short of NATO territory had a precedent close at hand. On 15 November 2022, during Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, a missile struck the Polish village of Przewodów near the border and killed two men at a grain dryer. Ukraine initially blamed Russia; the United States assessed that it was probably a Ukrainian air defence missile fired at an incoming Russian one, and in September 2023 the Polish Prosecutor’s Office confirmed that an out of control Ukrainian S-300 had caused the explosion. Poland requested a NATO meeting under Article 4 at the time, and alliance diplomats said they would act cautiously and needed time to establish exactly what had happened.
This time nothing crossed the line, and nobody died. What crossed was the message. Tsahkna, watching the petrol station burn on a video filmed a few hundred metres from the European Union, drew the conclusion he wanted drawn: “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”.