A Russian drone struck a Warsaw-bound train at Yahodyn on the Ukrainian-Polish border on Sunday, minutes after former UK prime minister Boris Johnson and other senior Western figures had passed through the same station, Ukraine’s state railway operator said.
Ukrzaliznytsia said a diplomatic train carrying security advisers from several EU member states and former European leaders, including Johnson, was at Yahodyn shortly before the locomotive was hit. Former CIA director David Petraeus was aboard another train at the station at the moment of the attack, the operator said.
No casualties were reported. Passengers on the struck train had been evacuated about 15 minutes before the drone hit its engine, and the diplomatic train had left earlier than scheduled because of a timetable change tied to the threat of Russian strikes.
Ukrzaliznytsia said “quite possibly, the target of this drone could have been the diplomatic train.” Russia’s Defence Ministry said it had struck rail infrastructure in western Ukraine used to move military goods from European countries.
Johnson, who had attended the Yalta European Strategy conference in Kyiv, wrote on X that he did not know “what warped logic drove Putin to blow up a stationary Ukrainian locomotive on the Polish border this morning,” calling it “the kind of random and senseless attack Ukrainians are enduring every day.”
The drone struck about 2km from the Polish border, according to Ukrainian and Polish authorities. Poland’s defence minister said one drone hit 1km from the border and another about 5km away. Polish F-16 fighter jets and a reconnaissance aircraft monitored the area, and Polish airspace was not violated.
Former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt, also returning from the Kyiv conference, told the BBC his train was ordered to prepare for evacuation after stopping before being cleared to continue. It reached Poland’s border station at Dorohusk safely.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said the attacks in the Volyn region set a locomotive on fire and damaged a petrol station. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said the strikes amounted to “Putin’s terror ‘knocking’ directly on the doors of the EU and Nato” and renewed calls for tougher sanctions on Moscow.
The incident follows a series of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s rail network. Earlier this month, a strike on the Kyiv-Warsaw line at the Polish border killed six railway workers, part of what Kyiv describes as a widening campaign against trains, depots and border crossings.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk convened a crisis team, warning that “the escalation of the actions from the Russian side is becoming a reality, and they are getting closer and closer to our border.” Polish operator PKP took over the train after a delay of more than six hours and continued it on to Warsaw.