UKRAINE: Ukrzaliznytsia CEO Oleksandr Pertsovskyi told European rail leaders at InnoTrans 2026 in Berlin that Ukraine’s experience should be a warning for their own long-term resilience strategies.
Pertsovskyi reported that Russian drone attacks on Ukraine’s railway have entered a new phase, with increasingly precise strikes targeting moving trains, with more than 360 locomotives hit in 2026 alone. ‘Ensure that you invest enough to back up the system, because unfortunately there might be players willing to disrupt it’, he warned.
Speaking at the InnoTrans Rail Leaders Summit in Berlin on September 23 alongside Germany’s Transport Minister Steffen Bilger, DB CEO Evelyn Palla and European Commission transport chief Magda Kopczyńska, Pertsovskyi contrasted the technology at the world’s biggest rail exhibition with the increasingly sophisticated systems being used to attack the Ukrainian railway.
Moving through the exhibition that morning, Pertsovskyi had seen a small robot playing music — a demonstration that, for him, carried a very different association. ‘I couldn’t help but think that the same robots, the same technology’, he said, were ‘at that same moment flying above our trains’, but being used ‘in a very different manner’; drones were deploying increasingly sophisticated image recognition ‘not to play music, but to destroy and kill’.
The ‘key challenge of the latest months’, he said, was the increasingly precise targeting of trains. Russian attacks had previously focused heavily on fixed infrastructure, with traction substations presenting what Pertsovskyi described as a particularly attractive target because they are large, predictable assets. But trains themselves are increasingly becoming targets.
That shift comes amid a sharp wider escalation. Ukrainian government figures recorded more than 1 500 attacks on railway assets in the first eight months of 2026, while by mid-September more than 500 locomotives had been damaged or destroyed since the start of the full-scale invasion, more than half of them this year. Pertsovskyi put the 2026 figure still higher at InnoTrans: ‘We know that more than 360 locomotives have been hit just this year.’
Moving targets
Pertsovskyi said UZ had previously regarded a moving train as relatively safe, on the assumption that Russian missiles and drones were principally targeting fixed assets. ‘We used to believe that when a train was moving, it was in a safe spot’, he said. That is no longer the case, with improved targeting technology enabling strikes against railway vehicles themselves.’
The threat is also moving closer to the EU. Earlier in September, a drone struck the locomotive of a passenger train at Yahodyn, around 2 km from the Polish border, after UZ’s monitoring system had detected the threat. The train was evacuated around 15 min before the strike and nobody was injured. Pertsovskyi drew particular attention to the location. ‘They’re getting closer’, he said. ‘One of the strikes was 2 km from the border between Poland and Ukraine, which is effectively the border with NATO.’
Seven or eight stops a day
Keeping trains running under that threat has required UZ to build an additional layer of surveillance into railway operations. Pertsovskyi said the company now operates what he described as a ‘cutting-edge’ underground monitoring centre, giving it ‘pretty much real-time understanding of what happens in the air over our tracks’, adding: ‘That’s not something you would normally think of for a dispatch centre.’
Locomotives are particularly exposed targets, producing a large thermal signature and carrying equipment whose loss can quickly disrupt an entire section of railway. At the same time, UZ passenger chief Oleh Holovashchenko has said the increasing use of faster, jet-powered Shahed-type drones is reducing the time available to react.
Monitoring teams therefore work around the clock, but trains are not automatically stopped whenever an air threat is detected. Decisions are taken service by service according to the location and immediate threat. For passengers, that can mean a journey being interrupted repeatedly: Pertsovskyi said some trains can be stopped seven or eight times in a day, with passengers and railway staff evacuated until it is considered safe to continue.
Pertsovskyi said those procedures had generally enabled UZ to get crews and passengers away from trains before they were struck, referring to only two cases this year in which train crews had been killed. ‘It’s not helping our timeliness record, not helping operational performance’, he acknowledged. ‘But safety comes first, and that’s how we operate.’
‘Keep the resilience pillar’
Pertsovskyi delivered his warning immediately after DB CEO Evelyn Palla had presented the German operator’s DB 2035 strategy, including plans to make one of Europe’s most intensively used networks more resilient. Ukraine demonstrated, he stated, why resilience could no longer be considered only in terms of conventional railway disruption.
‘When I hear DB’s 2035 strategy, my advice to them would be: always keep this resilience and safety pillar in mind’, he said. ‘Ensure that you invest enough to back up the system, because unfortunately there might be players willing to disrupt it.’
Looking further ahead, Pertsovskyi said Ukraine was continuing to extend 1 435 mm gauge infrastructure westwards even as attacks on the railway intensified. A first major step was completed in September 2025, when a 22 km standard gauge line opened between Chop and Uzhhorod, allowing direct trains from Uzhhorod towards Wien, Budapest and Bratislava. The project has been held up by unresolved border procedures and wider questions over how future standard gauge investment should be prioritised, but further links towards the EU are still being pursued, including a planned connection from Mostyska to Lviv.
‘Our dream is to connect Berlin and Lviv’, Pertsovskyi said. He credited UZ’s 260 000 employees with keeping that ambition alive while continuing to operate the railway under attack. ‘We will never stop, as much as they want us to do so.’
Source: rg
