A Russian drone has hit a train near the Ukraine-Poland border shortly after former UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and top European security officials had passed through.
No casualties were reported after the strike at Yahodyn, which hit the train’s engine. All the passengers had been evacuated, Ukrainian authorities said.
Johnson and other European national security advisers, including the UK’s Jonathan Powell, had passed along the same line on a different train on their way back from a conference in Kyiv.
Russia’s defence ministry said it had struck “railway infrastructure” in western Ukraine, but Ukraine’s state railway company Ukrzaliznytsia said the drone’s target “could have been the diplomatic train”.
Professor Katarzyna Pisarska, chair of the Warsaw Security Forum, told the BBC she was in the same carriage as Johnson and Powell, and the attack had happened about 30 minutes after their train had crossed into the Polish border.
In a statement, Ukraine’s railway authority Ukrzaliznytsia said the diplomatic train “had left the station earlier than expected because of the timetable change… due to constant threats of Russian strikes”.
It also said that an evacuation order for passengers on the hit train had been given “just 15 minutes” before the strike by a Russian jet-propelled drone.
Former CIA chief David Petraeus, who had been on board another train at Yahodyn station at the time of the strike, said the incident was “terrifying”.
In an interview with the New York Times, Petraeus said: “This is the act of a truly barbaric leader trying to terrorise Ukrainian civilians.”
Both Ukrainian and Polish authorities said the Russian drone had struck 2km (1.2 miles) from the Polish border.
Johnson wrote on X: “I don’t know what warped logic drove Putin to blow up a stationary Ukrainian locomotive on the Polish border this morning.
He said this was “the kind of random and senseless attack Ukrainians are enduring every day – even on civilian railways” and urged Kyiv’s allies to urgently provide Ukrainians “the air defences they need”.
Ukraine has made repeated pleas to its allies – particularly the US – to provide more interceptors to defend against daily Russian attacks that increasingly use fast-moving ballistic missiles and jet-propelled drones.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said the “barbaric strikes” at the Ukraine-Poland border in Yahodyn amounted to “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s terror ‘knocking’ directly on the doors of the EU and Nato” and renewed calls for more sanctions on Moscow.