Russian drone strikes train near Ukraine-Poland border shortly after Boris Johnson passes through
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, BBC News reported.
No casualties were reported after the strike at Yahodyn, which hit the train’s engine. All the passengers had been evacuated, Ukrainian authorities stated.
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. Johnson and other top European security advisers were on their way back from the Yalta European Strategy (YES) conference in Kyiv – an annual event that brings together leaders and experts from politics, business, security and mass media.
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”.
Meanwhile, Colonel Andrii Demchenko, spokesman for the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine, stated that recent Russian drone attacks on Rivne, Volyn and Lviv oblasts were facilitated by relay stations in Belarus.
“We can see that Belarus has not stopped supporting the terrorist country, because even these airstrikes on Rivne, Volyn and Lviv oblasts were also effectively enabled from Belarusian territory. The aerial assets launched by Russia were guided by signals relayed through stations on the territory of that country,” he told the national joint 24/7 newscast.
Professor Katarzyna Pisarska, chair of the Warsaw Security Forum, told the BBC she was in the same carriage as Johnson and Powell, and that the attack happened about 30 minutes after their train crossed 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.
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.
Meanwhile, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, accused Russia of attempting to scare Western countries with the attack.
In response to a question about the incident, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday: “Our military has been conducting operations across the entire territory of Ukraine and will continue to do so.”
Ukraine said strikes had continued overnight, with the country’s air force reporting that 85 of 108 Russian drones that were launched had been shot down.
Police in Chernihiv said on the morning of 14 September that three people had died after a warehouse belonging to an agricultural business was struck in Pryluky.
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