When horror came to Dnipro

Traveling by night train in Ukraine feels relatively safe - thanks to the professionalism of the staff. But one service last week turned into a nightmare, as it came under Russian attack.

Sometimes a photograph makes you catch your breath: and this one was the third class carriage on the Odesa Dnipro train.

I had taken a similar photo myself once, just over a year ago when the platzkart was the only ticket I could find on the night I needed to travel. A friend had insisted I must sleep with my bag under my head, in case someone tried to steal all my belongings. No one tried to steal my belongings, instead the girls on the benches opposite let me use their plug socket to recharge my phone.

It was perhaps not the most comfortable night but I slept perfectly well. I remember being excited to be drawing closer to Dnipro, watching the countryside along the river morph into more urban landscape, through Kamianske and then into the city itself.

Last week all hell broke loose on that train, service number 52, which departs Odesa late at night bound for Zaporizhzhia. As it approached Dnipro at around eleven o clock in the morning of 24 August, Russian ballistic missiles were flying through the skies above.

Ten minutes before it was due to pull into the station - one slammed into the ground next to the track, blowing out the windows in all 14 carriages, while five carriages were damaged. My friends who live near the station said they could see the smoke caused by the explosion from their flat.

Photo from Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets/X

There was a photograph, of the platzkart carriage, just like the one I took, only this carriage was broken and covered in blood.

The train had been filled with families on their way back from a seaside break in Odesa, according to the Ukrainian Railways press spokesman Oleksandr Shevchenko. Footage captured by mobile phone showed one young woman taking a selfie, smiling into the lens, seconds before an explosion. Outside the train, someone recorded bewildered families sheltering on the grass beside the tracks, some of them injured, others comforting children. The conductor was among those who were hurt, his eye hit by a shard of glass.

There are no air alarms on board a train, save for the electronic klaxon from the app on your phone: you may have muted this for the journey, assuming all will be fine. You look forward to the chance of an unbroken night’s sleep. You feel reassured by the familiar ritual of the journey, the neatly folded packet of sheets, the rocking motion and the sigh of the brakes.

There were more than 500 passengers and 19 cree members on board train 52 from Odesa to Dnipro when the missile fell by the track: miraculously no one was killed. The railway company ferried passengers to shelters while the air alarm continued, and found a replacement service to take 42 people on to Zaporizhzhia, just over an hour and a half later. Alternative rolling stock was re-deployed to make sure the return service to Odesa would run, according to schedule. As for the train itself, a statement said simply “the damaged cars will be repaired”.

Dnipro station - last year

In total, some 25 people were killed on that horrific morning in Dnipro and nearby Samar - while more than 340 others were injured, the youngest just six months old. The windows of two kindergartens were smashed, and staff had to rush terrified young children into a basement shelter. Dozens of stained glass windows in Dnipro’s historic chamber music hall were broken. The city smelled of smoke and loss.

The head of the regional military administration, Serhiy Lysak, called it a “day of horror” - adding “this is pain that echoes in every heart, pain that never fades”. And why was it not front page news, in headlines around the world? Of that, I cannot tell.