A Ukrainian soldier has described the moment a passenger train was targeted by Russian drones, killing five people.
When a carriage on the train was hit in northeastern Ukraine, passengers threw themselves on the floor in panic and the military officer told them to get out immediately.
Without his instruction, issued moments before the carriage burst into flames, many more passengers could have died.
The officer, whose army call-sign is Omar, is part of Ukraine’s 93rd brigade. He was among the passengers travelling on a route from Chop, on the border with Slovakia, to Barvinkove, the last stop before the front line in eastern Ukraine.
The first of three Russian drones landed near the train, forcing it to come to a halt.
“Then we heard the rumble of another drone, and then an explosion,” Omar tells the BBC. “The blast was so strong that parts of the carriage shattered into splinters.”
As the commander of a drone unit, he quickly realised he and the other passengers had to get out as the train could get hit again. In all, 291 people were on the train at the time, officials say.
“After the second hit, I understood that the drone operator was observing what kind of target it was hitting,” Omar says, and a stationary train was an easy target.
The carriage that suffered a direct hit quickly became engulfed in flames. “I am in the military and I am prepared for such attacks,” says Omar. “But for others it was a shock to be so close to death.”
Many passengers evacuated the train in a state of deep distress, and videos from the scene show people screaming and crying as they move away from the smouldering wreck.
It was too dangerous for such a large number of people to stay near the burning carriages, so he urged them to start moving towards a nearby motorway.
He then went back to the train with some of the other passengers to check if anyone had been left behind. Inspecting the carriages, he saw a body and continued to look for survivors. Five people lost their lives in the attack.
In the final carriage, Omar found a young woman with a baby.
“She was very scared and had no idea what to do but thank God she was alive,” he says.
She barely had time to put on warm clothes, and screamed she needed to go back to the carriage to retrieve her suitcase and documents, the officer says.
“I came here to bring my son,” she told Omar as she was getting off the train. Later, Omar understood she had been travelling to the front line so that her soldier husband could see their child.
The attack on the passenger train in Kharkiv region was condemned by President Volodymyr Zelensky as terrorism.
It hit the heart of the railway system – a symbol of resilience in a country where the airspace has been closed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Millions of Ukrainians rely on the 21,000km-long (13,000-mile) railway network to travel around the country and to cross the border into neighbouring countries, from which they can then catch flights.
Although the railways have been targeted in the past, by and large Ukraine’s Ukrzaliznytsia rail company has been able to keep people moving on its vast network – although escalating attacks on infrastructure and severe weather have led to increasingly long delays.
