A train carrying Boris Johnson and David Petraeus crossed near the Poland-Ukraine border shortly before a Russian drone strike hit a train engine near the crossing. Ukrainian Railways said the train may have been the target, and the attack unfolded during an overnight wave of Russian strikes across Ukraine.
Ukrainian Railways said the train had passed the border crossing shortly before the strike. The same overnight attacks involved more than 450 Russian drones and missiles, while Ukraine’s air force said it intercepted 405 drones and four missiles.
Katerina Sergatskova on the evacuation
Katerina Sergatskova, director of Daily Humanity, was on the Warsaw-bound train and described the evacuation at about 9am as the train approached the Polish border. She said: "At this point, the mood was different, we were asked to move very fast," and added: "Then I heard the first drone." She also said: "Seeing and hearing Shahed [drones] just a few hundred metres from the border is a very unpleasant experience."
The same train scene sat inside a wider night of attacks that killed at least six people and injured more than 40. The strikes also prompted air-raid warnings in Poland, and a lorry less than 1km from the Dorohusk-Yahodyn border crossing was hit.
Ukrainian Railways and the target question
Ukrainian Railways said it was quite likely that the Russian drone could also have been aimed at the diplomatic train. That leaves one point unresolved: whether the strike that hit the locomotive was aimed at the train that had carried Boris Johnson and David Petraeus, or at another target near the border.
Boris Johnson later wrote on X: "I don’t know what warped logic drove Putin to blow up a stationary Ukrainian locomotive on the Polish border this morning. What we can say for sure is that this is the kind of random and senseless attack Ukrainians are enduring every day – even on civilian railways." The next diplomatic point in the story is the public handling of that claim by Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, who called it "Putin’s terror knocking directly on the doors of the EU and Nato".
