Russian drone kills two rail workers on Odesa passenger train

A Russian jet-powered Shahed drone struck the locomotive of the Odesa-Dnipro passenger train in the Berezivka district on Thursday morning, killing the driver and his assistant, according to Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, chairman of the state railway operator Ukrzaliznytsia. The train was carrying 340 people when the drone hit, and the two crew members were the only fatalities. Pertsovskyi confirmed the deaths and the details of the strike in a post on Facebook.

Today in the Odesa region, the Russians once again destroyed an ordinary passenger train locomotive with a jet-powered drone. There were 340 people on the train. And whoever was operating that drone certainly could not have been unaware that the target was entirely civilian.

Zelenskyy posted the statement on X, calling the attack deliberate and part of a broader campaign to disrupt civilian life and logistics in Ukraine. He said the operator could not have missed that the train carried civilians. The president renewed his calls for stronger air defenses and more international pressure on Moscow, framing the strike as an ongoing campaign of terror against ordinary Ukrainians.

How the strike unfolded

A monitoring team detected the drone and ordered the train to stop near a station, Pertsovskyi said. The drone then made a sudden maneuver, leaving the crew too little time to evacuate the locomotive after they had brought the train to a halt. The strike was a direct hit that destroyed the locomotive, and the two railway workers, the machinist and his assistant, were killed at their posts.

They have the capability in certain areas to hunt moving trains.

That warning came at a March 24 press conference, months before the Odesa strike bore it out. Emergency responders reached the scene to extinguish a fire in the wrecked locomotive. Oleh Kiper, head of the Odesa Regional Military Administration, confirmed the attack and shared footage of the aftermath, showing the twisted metal of the engine and smoke rising over the tracks.

Russia launched 133 drones at Ukraine overnight into Thursday, targeting 15 locations across the country, according to Ukrainian officials. Russian forces also struck port infrastructure in the Izmail district of the Odesa region during the same wave of attacks, part of a broader pattern of pressure on the south's transport and export routes along the Danube.

340 passengers, 67 of them children

All 340 passengers were evacuated and taken to Odesa aboard 21 buses arranged by emergency services, Ukrzaliznytsia said. The group included 67 children. None of the passengers were physically harmed in the first strike.

The footage from the national emergency services showed the severely damaged locomotive as firefighters extinguished the flames. A nearby carriage had its windows shattered by the blast. Passengers were filmed hauling their luggage onto the evacuation buses lined up beside the tracks.

A second passenger train was struck hours later in the same region, according to Euronews. That train was carrying about 500 people, and a child was injured when it was hit. The two strikes together put more than 800 civilians on trains that Russian drones went after in a single day across one region.

Two passenger trains hit in a single day in one region points to a deliberate focus, not stray fire. Russia has increasingly shifted from striking fixed railway infrastructure to going after trains while they move, including passenger services full of civilians.

Passenger trains become targets

Since January 1, Russian forces have carried out 472 attacks on Ukraine's railway network, damaging 1,128 targets, according to Ukrzaliznytsia. Those targets included 40 passenger cars, 81 locomotives, 145 freight wagons and 12 stations. Attacks climbed from 134 in January to 166 in February and peaked at 206 in March, when Russia was hitting railway infrastructure about six times a day. The railway operator says Russian crews are now specifically aiming at locomotives to strand trains and cut connections.

There is no tool today that provides 95% protection, no magic dome over trains. We are adapting every day.

Trains remain one of Ukraine's most important lifelines, with 80,000 to 90,000 people on board across the country at any given moment. Protection relies on a mix of air defense, mobile fire groups, electronic warfare systems, interceptor drones, aviation and security measures for passengers. Pertsovskyi has said there is no single tool that can shield a moving train, and that the railway adapts its defenses daily.

The tactic echoes first-person view drone attacks in front-line cities like Kherson, a practice known as human safari, now expanding with larger, longer-range drones aimed at trains far from the front. Andrii Kharuk, a military expert, said the shift is likely enabled by modifications to Shahed-type drones that let operators find and follow moving targets across open ground.

Not the first train

On January 27, a Russian drone strike hit a passenger train in Kharkiv Oblast operating on the Barvinkove-Lviv-Chop route with 291 passengers aboard, killing at least six people. Some bodies were so severely damaged that forensic identification was required. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksii Kuleba said three Russian drones were used, hitting the front of the locomotive and a passenger car. Zelenskyy called that attack an act of terrorism, and French President Emmanuel Macron described it as unacceptable.

Shahed drones and the hunt for trains

Russia has been deliberately using modified Shahed-type drones to hunt and target moving passenger trains, according to an analysis by Ukraine's Arms Monitor. The innovation behind train hunting lies in two modifications: mesh modems and forward-facing cameras installed on the drones. The mesh modems build dynamic relay networks that extend the drones' range and resilience, while the cameras let operators see and identify specific targets, including civilian trains, in real time.

The Shahed is an Iranian-designed unmanned combat aircraft, manufactured both in Iran and at Russian facilities. Russian production reached an estimated 2,700 of the drones a month by 2024 and 2025, enabling high-volume attacks that overwhelm Ukraine's air defenses through sheer scale. In 2025 alone, Moscow launched more than 54,500 Shahed-type drones against Ukrainian targets, and analysts say the weekly average of such drones jumped from 75 to more than 900 over roughly 18 months.

Serhiy Beskrestnov, a Ukrainian drone and radio technology expert known as FLASH, described a near-miss in which a Shahed operator spotted a passenger train, understood it was carrying people and decided to attack. The passengers, he wrote, had no idea how close they came to death. Such targeted attacks have grown more frequent since August 2025 and became a serial tactic by early September, the analysis found.

A deadly summer for civilians

UN monitors confirmed 1,396 Ukrainian civilians killed and 7,978 injured in the first six months of 2026, a sharp increase over the same period in 2024 and 2025 as Russia pushed more long-range strikes past the front line. July was the deadliest month for Ukrainian civilians since April 2022, the UN's aid coordination office said, calling Kyiv one of the hardest hit cities, with at least 54 civilians killed there in that month alone. The verified death toll since the invasion began stands at 16,874.

Matthias Schmale, the UN's humanitarian coordinator in Ukraine, said that with no cessation of the attacks, more families have been left devastated, displaced or struggling to rebuild their lives. UN data shows both sides have escalated their long-range strikes through 2026, driving the spike in civilian deaths. The agency has said its verified toll is likely an undercount, because it cannot confirm casualties in Russian-occupied areas.

Zelenskyy again pressed allies for more air defense systems, warning of a critical shortage as Russia's ballistic missiles prove difficult for Ukraine to intercept. He framed the train strike as part of a sustained effort to disrupt civilian life and wear the country down. In June and July of 2025, by one count, Russia fired 11,739 drones alongside 433 cruise and ballistic missiles, killing 518 civilians.

Since the full-scale invasion began, 165 people have been killed and 920 injured in direct attacks on railway assets, the National Police of Ukraine reports, a count that includes rail workers, passengers and bystanders near the tracks. Ukrzaliznytsia has halted services to cities in the Donetsk region because of the strikes, and each new attack thins the connections that keep the rest of the country moving. For the two crew members on the Odesa-Dnipro locomotive, the warning that reached them on Thursday came a few seconds too late.