By Olha Chepil | 2025-02-13

KYIV -- Despite the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian Railways (Ukrzaliznytsia) has modernized railcars, expanded routes and become the country's largest employer.

With air travel halted, it serves not only massive numbers of refugees, displaced persons and wounded soldiers but also world leaders.

"We're proud of our punctuality. We always stick to the schedules. Only shelling or other occurrences of force majeure can affect the movement of the trains," Ukrzaliznytsia spokeswoman Yelyzaveta Kravets told Kontur.

"This is especially important in wartime, when stability and predictability have special significance."

A symbol of Ukrainian resistance

When the full-scale war began in Ukraine, the railroad became one of the country's main logistical means and a symbol of Ukrainian resistance.

On the morning of February 24, 2022, Ukrzaliznytsia announced the first evacuation trips originating from near the front. Any route to the western part of the country became a pathway to life for millions of Ukrainians.

During the trips, sat on the floor, in the washrooms, on bedding, on buckets and in vestibules, while children sat on the upper shelves meant for luggage.

"All our teams banded together to respond quickly to the influx of passengers and the danger of the shelling," Kravets said. "We evacuated people and transported them to safe places under the most difficult conditions."

Ukrainian trains transported more than 1 million fleeing passengers in the first eight days of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Some civilians who had been hiding in basements from Russian bombing jumped onto moving trains, without any belongings.

Three years on, the pace of the trips is not letting up. These days the company sells about 100,000 tickets per day.

"The war is still going on, and planes aren't flying... That's why in this case Ukrzaliznytsia continues to play a big role," Oleksiy Plotnikov, a Ukrainian economist and academic, told Kontur.

The war forced Ukrzaliznytsia to change drastically, said Plotnikov.

Previous attempts at reform had been stop-and-start.

When Ukraine hosted the 2012 UEFA European Football Championship, it put high-speed Hyundai trains in service for the first time.

But on the whole, before 2022 the railroad in Ukraine was not in top condition, with antiquated cars and locomotives, a trail of failed reforms, and the burden of debt.

The railroad's Soviet-era cars had "no hot water" and "unsanitary" bathrooms, Plotnikov remembered.

Keeping trains moving

Now Ukrzaliznytsia is smashing all records. It is growing fast, modernizing its electrified and diesel locomotives, building new passenger cars, introducing new food options on passenger trips, and opening new international routes.

"We have 13 new routes and connections, and trains that we didn't have before the full-scale invasion started," Kravets said. "For example, there's Dnipro to Chełm, Kharkiv to Chełm and Zaporizhzhia to Przemyśl."

Ukrzaliznytsia has been building infrastructure faster than it did before the invasion.

The company plans soon to roll out 66 new cars built in Ukraine.

They have features like Braille signage, high-contrast display panels, additional handrails and buttons to call the conductor.

"One of our key initiatives is the Food Train... It travels to the eastern regions and helps to overcome the aftereffects of the constant attacks on civilian infrastructure," Kravets said.

The Howard G. Buffett Foundation, a private family philanthropic foundation based in the United States, funds the train.

"Since this train has been running, the team has prepared more than a million meals for residents of the affected communities," Kravets said.

The railroad has also taken on a larger role in Ukrainian exports. Before the war, half of the country's imports and exports passed through Odesa's port.

Since the Russians blocked maritime routes, Ukraine has upped rail transport of wheat, coal, steel and chemical products to the West.

With both air and maritime transport blocked, "the railroad has stepped in and taken over all cargo shipments of agricultural products, wheat and everything else," Plotnikov said.

Battles for Ukraine's railroad have been ongoing since the very start of the war. The Russians tried to take control of Ukrzaliznytsia's logistics centers as quickly as possible, especially in the large cities.

Because they failed, they now are trying to destroy the centers, said Kravets.

Success would stop Western deliveries of weapons.

"Railroad workers are repairing damaged infrastructure on a daily basis -- they're rebuilding bridges, tracks and stations," Kravets said. "Thanks to their dedication, we can keep the trains moving continuously."

A hospital on wheels

As the war grinds on, the trains have a new type of equipment: medical cars. They are specially refitted passenger cars that evacuate wounded soldiers to hospitals.

"This was my idea. You could say it came from scratch," Irina Soloshenko, who leads the KOLO Foundation's mobile evacuation initiative for wounded combatants, told Kontur.

"How do you transport the wounded when the sky is closed and you can't move a large number of helicopters?"

Soloshenko and a team of railroad workers and anesthesiologists decided to refit an ordinary car. They put in gurneys and all the equipment needed to treat the injured.

"We used chalk to sketch out on the floor where we could put gurneys and how many, where we could put medical equipment and where to install electricity under everything," Soloshenko said. "So all of this literally arose from the wheels up. We made the first car in four days."

Soloshenko and her team started with one intensive care unit car, equipped with ventilators and oxygen support, for five severely wounded troops. They then added another car to accommodate 10 less seriously injured passengers.

Thus, Ukraine now has two different kinds of medical cars for injured troops.

"We've already completely upgraded the medical cars to the point that they can be medical facilities on wheels," Soloshenko said.