‘No longer only conductors’: Ukraine’s rail workers play key war role

Oleksandr Kamyshin, the CEO of Ukraine’s state-owned train company and one of the country’s most powerful men, mingled in a crowd of about 60 children aged 10 to 16 and at least a dozen pets.

At the Children’s Railway, a Kyiv park complete with a miniature train station, they were all celebrating the many Ukrainian people and pets evacuated by rail. Students at the associated Children’s Railway School, training to one day work in the train system, had dressed appropriately in conductor outfits.

It was a fitting, rare few hours off for Mr. Kamyshin, wearing a navy polo and cargo pants himself. That week in June, he’d spent five of his last seven nights in an overnight car. So even on a morning he wasn’t working, what was one more short ride on the park’s short loop? Ukrainian Railways’ accomplishments, he says, should be celebrated.

“Before the war, [the railwayman profession didn’t have] that good of a reputation,” he says. “Now you say the term ‘railwayman’ and you will get a hug.”

Before February, Ukrainian Railways was better known for its halting bureaucracy than bringing people to safety. Since then, the company has evacuated 4 million people from the country’s south, east, and center, and brought another half a million into neighboring countries, says Mr. Kamyshin. Its cars deliver military equipment and diplomats, ship goods amid the Black Sea blockade, and have carried some 100,000 tons of humanitarian aid, he says. “Some people say that we are the second army because we ... are close to them in importance.”

Crises often expose an institution’s existing flaws – a trend so often seen during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ukrainian Railways’ success in the last five months is a moment where the crisis didn’t win. Facing artillery attacks, altered routes, and enemy occupation of 20% of its network, the country’s train system has adapted, kept running.

That work fits the zeitgeist in Ukraine right now – extraordinary perseverance meeting extraordinary challenges. Among so many other institutions also adapting, Ukrainian Railways has become a symbol of national pride even as it sustains the nation’s war effort. In the last five months, pronouncing its name, Ukrzaliznytsia, has become a way to prove a person’s Ukrainian accent.

“We’re just doing our job,” says Mr. Kamyshin. “It’s not something special. It’s not something heroic. We just don’t stop.”

“We are no longer only conductors”

On Feb. 23, Svitlana Kravchuk, a 22-year-veteran train attendant based in Lviv, was traveling on an overnight route to Odesa. Early in the morning, passengers woke to the news that their country was at war. When they arrived, the platform at Odesa’s station was already packed and panicked. People banged on windows as others crowded inside. Two hundred people fit into cars that usually carry 40. Many didn’t have space to sit down.

Ms. Kravchuk used to collect tickets and clean rooms. Now she had to console people fleeing their homes. She worked as many evacuation routes as possible, barely taking a break for three weeks. When they had to stop to avoid shelling, she sometimes spent more than 24 hours on a train.

“We are no longer only conductors,” she says. “We sometimes have to be friends, psychologists, even parents for children.”

“The war is really changing everything.”

For weeks, starting Feb. 24, Mr. Kamyshin measured his life in conference calls, speaking with regional traffic managers each hour. Those managers suddenly needed to manage bottlenecks at each station and artillery barrages that made travel more difficult.

As of June 8, the Kyiv School of Economics estimates that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused some $2.7 billion in damage to railway infrastructure and rolling stock. About a fifth of the train system’s reach is now under occupied territory. Since February, according to Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, CEO of Ukrainian Railways’ passenger division, 170 of its employees have been killed. One of the worst moments of the war occurred when a Russian cluster bomb hit a train platform in Kramatorsk, killing almost 60.

Still, given the train system’s importance to Ukraine’s war effort, it’s almost surprising that the Russian military hasn’t targeted such infrastructure more. After invading the country from multiple fronts this winter, the Russian attack has now concentrated on eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region. It’s now under immense fire, and Russia for now may be content to damage more infrastructure in fewer places.

Of course, the Russian military is highly dependent on trains for its own supplies. Many speculate that it has avoided targeting Ukrainian rail infrastructure in the hope that it will be able to make use of it later, should the war go Russia’s way.

Or, the train system may just be too big a target. “We have thousands of important places in the railway [system],” says Denys Rynski, a volunteer who helped coordinate logistics for Lviv’s train station. “It’s impossible to bomb all of them.”

“We have to find a way to keep a sense of normalcy”

When the train system is bombed a few things happen immediately, says Mr. Pertsovskyi, the passenger head. As soon as it’s safe, teams deploy to assess the damage and start repairs. A regional traffic manager reroutes the delayed train and others to limit disruptions. A dispatch team communicates with the conductor, who communicates with the attendants, who communicate with the passengers. Everyone on board gets free food and drinks.

“Part of this calmness is that people are not asking questions,” says Mr. Pertsovskyi. “They’re just doing their job.”

He compares them to Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the US Airways pilot who emergency-landed a passenger plane in the Hudson River.  

In Ukraine, the emergency isn’t just one day, one flight, or one ride. It’s every day, and it looks like it will be for a while. “Even during the war, we have to live on,” says Mr. Kamyshin. “We have to find a way to keep a sense of normalcy in our lives.”

That’s come at the cost of normalcy in his own life. Riding around the short loop at the Children’s Railway, in the small train decorated with pictures of Minecraft and Thomas the Tank Engine, Mr. Kamyshin keeps silencing phone calls. But one he picks up. For a few minutes, he looks only at the small screen in his hand, pointing the camera around the car. 

It’s one of his two sons. During the war, Mr. Kamyshin has only seen his family three times. “That’s one of the worst things in this war for me,” he says. “I’ve got two boys and I really miss them.”

To him, the sacrifice is worth it. To others, it has been as well.

For weeks, Oleksa Vozniak volunteered to help serve refugees arriving at the Lviv train station. Early in the war, some 50,000 people would show up each day, more than 10 times the usual number of arrivals in pre-war days. They needed places to eat, sleep, and stay warm during winter. Mr. Vozniak learned he could work 24 hours straight.

But in a country with so many different regions and regional identities, he saw something he’d never seen before: a mix of Ukrainians coexisting from all over Ukraine. Some refugees later became volunteers too. Ukraine’s train system, he says, helped make Ukraine.

“This is the place, this is the time when the Ukrainian nation was built, because I saw so many people volunteering,” says Mr. Vozniak.

“There is no difference between a person who is from Kramatorsk or from Dnipro or from Lviv,” he says. “This is just one united nation.”

Oleksandr Naselenko in Lviv and Olya Bystritskaya in Kyiv supported reporting for this story.