Russian Drones Forced Ukrzaliznytsia to Evacuate 5,831 Trains Across Ukraine

Ukrzaliznytsia evacuated 5,831 trains because of Russian drone attacks in September 2026, the state-owned railway operator reported. That works out to an average of 205 stopped trains every day, turning emergency evacuations and delays lasting hours into a recurring burden for passengers across Ukraine.

The figure captures the operational tradeoff now facing the railway: Ukrzaliznytsia is sacrificing punctuality and network capacity to keep passengers and crews away from an approaching threat. Chief executive Oleksandr Pertsovskyi told the BBC that safety has become the overriding priority, even for an operator that has taken pride in keeping trains running reliably during the war.

Threat monitoring now shapes routine rail operations

Railway staff use an underground command center in Kyiv to monitor passenger trains, freight movements and aerial threats in real time. When the operator’s safety criteria indicate that a passenger train is too close to a tracked threat, the train is stopped and evacuated. Travelers may have to wait beside the railway or move into available shelters until the danger has receded sufficiently for service to resume.

This is not simply a timetable problem. Every precautionary stop occupies track, interrupts planned train movements and complicates the positioning of crews and rolling stock. A delay affecting one service can propagate through a network as dispatchers adjust crossings, station access and onward connections. When hundreds of trains are stopped in a typical day, the railway is effectively exchanging usable capacity for a larger safety margin.

That choice can reduce immediate exposure, but it cannot make the system fully predictable. The duration and location of an aerial alert are outside the railway’s control, so planners cannot treat these stoppages like scheduled maintenance or a known infrastructure closure. Passengers may face a short interruption or remain off a train for hours.

Locomotive losses add a second constraint

Ukrzaliznytsia said 521 locomotives have been hit since Russia began its full-scale invasion in 2022. Almost 60% of those strikes occurred during 2026, according to the operator. Reported attacks on railway facilities also rose from 1,206 in 2025 to 1,700 so far this year.

Those figures matter because operational disruption and equipment attrition reinforce one another. Evacuations reduce the number of trains that can move through the network on schedule, while damaged locomotives reduce the equipment available to recover from those delays. Locomotives are also specialized assets rather than interchangeable road vehicles; repairs, replacements and compatibility requirements can limit how quickly lost capacity is restored.

The operator reported that eight employees were killed in 2026, including six in a ballistic-missile strike on a Kyiv locomotive depot. Russia’s defence ministry denies targeting civilians and says its railway attacks are directed at infrastructure used to transport military personnel and equipment.

Attributed drone advances increase the monitoring burden

Pertsovskyi attributed the intensified pressure partly to drones equipped with cameras and networked connectivity that can pursue moving targets. He also said some recent Russian drones use artificial-intelligence tools and image recognition. These descriptions are claims from the railway executive and have not been independently demonstrated in the available reporting.

At a systems level, the claimed change would help explain why a railway cannot rely only on fixed-site protection. Trains move across a geographically distributed network, while command staff must continually compare train positions with changing threat information. Ukrzaliznytsia has identified electronic disruption as one countermeasure priority, but Pertsovskyi described the contest between drone capabilities and defenses as a continuing “cat-and-mouse game.”

The broader reliability challenge is therefore layered: detect a threat early enough to act, communicate with trains and crews, move passengers to safer locations, preserve enough locomotives for scheduled service and restore traffic after the alert. None of those functions alone keeps the railway operating; they must work as one coordinated control and logistics system.

Winter raises the cost of every evacuation

Cold weather will make that safety strategy harder to sustain. Temperatures can fall to minus 20 degrees Celsius or below, leaving evacuated passengers exposed when suitable shelters are not nearby. Ukrzaliznytsia and international donors are preparing winter evacuation packs, mobile shelters and replacement bus services for areas experiencing frequent interruptions.

Those measures will not eliminate delays or replace lost rolling stock. They are intended to keep precautionary stoppages from becoming a separate cold-weather hazard while preserving basic national connectivity. September’s 5,831 evacuations show the scale for which the railway must now prepare: not an occasional emergency, but hundreds of disrupted trains on an average day.

By Stephen Wallace — Editor for AMI’s aerospace integration and unmanned mobility coverage, focused on drone manufacturing, VTOL systems, autonomous networks, and air-ground mobility links.