Encounters on Ukrainian trains

I travel a lot across Ukraine on the night trains run by Ukrzaliznytsia - they’re clean, punctual and comfortable - and you almost always meet someone interesting in the carriage.

I met a woman on the sleeper train to Kyiv: a child psychologist from Chernihiv who had been in Europe to give support to Ukrainian children living as refugees in Germany and Switzerland. One group had been taken on a visit to a museum. There was a skeleton there of a mammoth, she said, donated from St Petersburg in the 1950s. When the children saw it was from Russia they began spitting at it and trying to kick it. The museum people had no idea how to respond. The school had turned to the psychologist for help. Then she told me how her own brother had moved to Moscow ten years earlier and married a Russian woman. When Chernihiv was being bombarded at the start of the war, she had managed to get through by phone, assuming they would be concerned about their parents’ safety. Instead they shouted Russian propaganda at her and even laughed. She told me she had not wanted to speak to them again.