The railway network in Ukraine also does what it can during wartime, although many rail connections cut right through the Russian lines. In this way civilians are able to flee their cities and soldiers and volunteers can reach their destination.
When the train has started shockingly and abrasively, a woman steps firmly into the compartment. Don’t move, she gestures, that roller blind must stay down. She cuts out the main light. Darkened we will soon pass through the dark land. If we do get shelled or bombed, do it like this, she says. She bends down and puts her hands on the back of her head, elbows down, and takes cover under the table.
She stands up again and pats the mattress again. She says something in Russian, and shakes her index finger back and forth: no, that’s not going to happen tonight.
Thus begins the night train to Odessa.
It’s war in Ukraine, but the trains are running. The route this night is from Lviv, where the air raid sirens go off several times a day, right past pro-Russian Transnistria to Odessa, which has been preparing for a possible Russian attack for a few weeks. And that’s not even the hardest route. Trains leave Kyiv every day on a railway line that, according to the map, really goes right through the Russian lines. Even in the east, in Russian territory, trains are still running. If there’s one thing that holds Ukraine together, it’s the rail network.
In peacetime, it is the sixth largest rail network in the world in passenger numbers and seventh in tons of freight. But it also does what it can in wartime.
odyssey
Without the trains, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians would still have been trapped in cities like Kyiv and Kharkiv, at the mercy of Russian artillery. Without the trains, the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia would not have been able to come to Kyiv this week to show their support for Ukrainian President Volodomir Zelensky. And without the trains, the dozens of Ukrainian military personnel and foreign volunteers would not be able to go to Odessa who will board this evening in Lviv.
Somehow it reminds me of Interrail, that kind of chat on the platform under the enormous roof of the station while waiting for the train. Where are you from? Where are you going? How is it over there? Only the answers are a bit more existential. A Japanese boy has the front at Mykolayiv as his final destination. He shows a video in which he lifts a refugee child. “Will you put this on social media when I’m dead?” he asks. “So people can see who I fought for.”
A lady from the Donetsk region also enters, the region to the east where Russian separatists have been fighting Ukraine for years. She asks for help with her bags. Russian soldiers broke her arm, she says, when she fled two weeks ago. And they stole my phone too. These are crooks, not soldiers.’
Tamara Simioneva is her name, she is sixty years old and working on an Odyssey about the rails of Ukraine. After her flight she spent a week in the Carpathians, the mountains in the west of the country, but she has had enough. “There was nothing to do. I’m going back again. I want to go home to my son.’
Tonight she goes from Lviv to Odessa, from the north to the south, and then from the west to the east, from Odessa to Donetsk. Crisscross across the country, across the lines. “My son works at the railways, he repairs the rails,” she says. “He always says: only when the trains stop running, Ukraine is defeated.”
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Perhaps that is why the Ukrainian army has a special division of railway mechanics, men and women who can quickly repair blown rails, bridge a bomb crater. A report was broadcast on CNN this week about Oleksandr Kamysjin, the chief of the railways, a man with a ponytail who has been driving through the country for three weeks in his own executive train with fencing vests, helmets and a rifle to reach the smallest stations. discuss how things can be kept going. “How the system still works amazes the whole country, and even the president,” Kamyshin said.
The train to Odessa is not going as fast as usual. Just over 50 kilometers per hour – it takes fifteen hours to cover the 800 kilometers. Children play computer games on the benches until they fall over; their mothers wait with hopeless faces until they arrive at their indeterminate destination. The conductor, posted in a small cubicle with refrigerator and microwave, gets off all night at freezing cold deserted stations, in her stiff dark blue coat with gold braid, to draw hot water for the passengers after sunrise from a boiler that is not used in a locomotive. would be wrong. In this way it at least offers something of certainty: a cup of tea in the morning.
She also collects the unused bedding. Passengers have not used sheets, have not put on pajamas – they have slept with the clothes on. In Ukraine you should always be able to flee, even from the train, even from the train that is always running.