Ukraine, how did the railways work under the bombs

Two days after the retreat of Russian troops from Kherson, on November 11, the CEO of railways of Ukraine, Alexander Kamyshin arrived in the city accompanied by Ukrainian special forces and a small team of railway workers. The group reached the central railway station, before the regular army had even arrived to secure the city, and set to work. Six days later, the first train from Kiyv entered the Kherson liberated.

“Was a magical day – says Kamyshin -. We saw the faces of people who saw the train, crying and waving their hands. Believe me, it was unforgettable. It is one of the days to remember forever“.

Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine a year ago, Kamyshin and his colleagues have worked tirelessly to keep the country’s trains running. Ukrainian railways carried four million refugees and more than 330 thousand tons of humanitarian aid, pushing trains right up to the front lines, and sometimes even beyond. In the face of the almost total impossibility of air travel, Ukraine’s trains have brought you to Kiyv at least three hundred foreign delegationsas part of an “iron diplomacy” programme. Earlier this week, a train dubbed “Rail Force One” secretly brought US President Joe Biden to the Ukrainian capital for a symbolic visit.

All this work has taken place under almost constant attack: “The Russians bomb the tracks, the stations, the bridges, the power plants, the cranes, they bomb everything Kamyshin says. I am two hundred and fifty people died, eight hundred were injured. Only between railway workers and women. This is the price we have paid in this war“.

Connected via Zoom from Kiyv, Kamyshin is taciturn but has a catalog of ready-to-use jokes (when I ask him how it was possible to get the trains to Mariupol, after the city had been razed to the ground by Russian bombing, his answer is simply: “very quickly“). The CEO of Ukrainian Railways explains that the invasion of Russia, which began on February 24, 2022, it wasn’t entirely unexpected and that the government had plans in case of war: “Institutions like the Ukrainian Railways always have a plan. The problem is, that plan existed on paper. It was completely irrelevant“.