Oleksandr Kamyshin is 37. The Ukrainian railway manager now functions more like a war operations director. He has become one of the most important figures of his country. He has not seen his wife and two sons for three weeks. He is convinced that the Russians want to kill him and tries to outrun them. He told the BBC and CNN.
Read everything about the Russian invasion in this dossier.
Kamyshin is constantly surrounded by bodyguards and never stays in one place for long. He never follows a set routine that the Russians could figure out. As a railway master, he realizes that he is a target of the Russian army, which invaded Ukraine three weeks ago. “We have to be faster than those who track us down,” the BBC quoted him as saying.
Oleksandr Kamyshin heads Ukraine’s largest employer, with 603,470 km² the second largest country in Europe after Russia. The Ukrainian railways employ 231,000 people. 33 personnel have already died in the war that the Russians started on February 24 against Ukraine. People who gave their lives to save the lives of others. Kamyshin and his staff were able to rescue an estimated 2.5 million Ukrainians, mostly people fleeing from the country’s dangerous east and south to the relatively safer west. About a quarter of a million of them continued on to Poland.
Not an easy mission. The train schedules have to be constantly adapted to the attacks of the Russians. They bomb the tracks and train stations every day, Kamyshin says. “Our people are risking their lives. They are being shot at. They keep saving people.” A new route schedule is created every day and will be announced at 9 a.m. in the evening. “When the shelling stops, we will continue to repair the tracks. We’ll keep the trains running as long as we can. We have no other option.”
Kamyshin not only ensures that Ukrainians can flee from the war, but also that aid supplies get to the areas where there is fighting. The Ukrainian railways also bring soldiers to the front and take care of the export of what the country can still export in time of war. The main seaports in the south of Ukraine have now been taken by the Russians. “Then let’s go west,” Kamyshin says.
Kamyshin expects more from the West than just arms supplies and humanitarian aid. Like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his government, Kamyshin is also calling for a no-fly zone over his country. “Ukraine will win the war anyway. All that remains to be done is to close the airspace through the West.”
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