During the first three weeks of the war last year, as Russian troops pushed into central and southern Ukraine, the railway focused mainly on evacuations and delivering aid humanitarian towards bombed and bombed cities. Passenger trains headed west toward the Polish border carrying refugees, then returned to the front filled with supplies.
In Mariupol, a Black Sea port city near the Russian border that was bombed relentlessly until the final collapse of resistance in May 2022, railway workers managed to move trains in and out several times before the tracks are not destroyed. The stranded crews were able to evacuate by road, but two trains are still stuck there.
Since the war’s momentum shifted last fall and Ukrainian forces began to retake large areas of the country, Kamyshin’s focus has shifted to reconnecting the liberated towns. “This is important because it gives freedom to travel to people who have been captured for a long time. We provide humanitarian aid [at] on a large scale… And it breathes new life into the economy,” he says.
As Russian forces retreated, they changed tactics, focusing their attacks on civilian infrastructure. Kamyshin claims that last year 12,000 strikes had to be repaired on the railways. He says maintenance crews had to innovate to get their hands on parts and make repairs under fire, but he declined to give details. “Sharing creative solutions means giving ideas to Russians. It’s not the best idea at the moment,” he said.
As Russian strikes against power plants have become more frequent, Ukrainian Railways has put old diesel locomotives into service. When an electric train gets stuck, a diesel engine shuts down and saves it. In the event of a power outage, stations turn on emergency generators and, in the event of an outage, the railway company can turn to a stockpile of 15,000 cubic meters of firewood. “We are pretty well supported,” says Kamyshin.
With non-military flights over Ukraine virtually impossible, Kamyshin and his colleagues had to manage the flow of foreign leaders and diplomats traveling to kyiv to meet with the government. The journey from the Polish border to the Ukrainian capital takes 10 hours, and few leaders stay long before turning around. “President Biden spent 20 hours on the train and only four hours in kyiv,” says Kamyshin. “We interact with him more than anyone else. His opinion of my country was therefore formed as strongly on the railways as in the city.”
Biden’s first words when he got off the train were: “It’s good to be back in kyiv.” » His visit days before the anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was a major political play that took weeks of planning. The president and his entourage boarded a train in Przemyśl Główny in Poland shortly after 9 p.m., traveling overnight to arrive in kyiv at 8 a.m. the next morning.
As proud as he is of the iron diplomacy program, Kamyshin admits to being a little frustrated. Rail Force One, as it is now known, caused delays of up to 90 minutes to other services on the line. “It was painful for me and my team,” he said. “I apologized to my customers because this is not the appropriate level of service we should be providing.”
