On board the mobile command that's keeping Ukraine's trains running

• Ukraine's rail system is a top priority as the country moves people, aid, and supplies.
• Photographer Alan Chin traveled with Ukrzaliznytsia's leadership.

Lviv, Ukraine – As the head of passenger operations at Ukrzaliznytsia – Ukrainian Railways – Oleksandr Pertsovskyi is one of the people keeping Ukraine moving.

The fast evacuation of civilians and wounded soldiers, and the movement of humanitarian aid and military supplies, are top priorities as Ukraine fends off Russian assaults. And so, from the start of the invasion, the railroad's leadership left their headquarters in Kyiv and have been constantly shuttling back and forth across the country.

I met Pertsovskyi at the main entrance to Lviv's train station, a grand Art Nouveau structure built in 1904, when Lviv was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Thousands of people were packed in and around the building, having arrived from Kyiv, Kharkiv, and other areas under Russian attack. Most of them were also waiting for trains to Poland – 43 miles to the west – where 10,000 people are going a day. Several hundred local volunteers had erected tents and were providing hot soup, coffee, and tea, as well as blankets. Outside, as temperatures hovered around freezing, people made fires and gathered around them for warmth.

Pertsoivskyi's responsibilities normally include promoting "jazz festivals and festive events." But at 5 am on Feb. 24, when Russian air and missile strikes in Kyiv and across Ukraine signaled the beginning of a full blown invasion on multiple fronts, "my job changed like every railway man's in the country," he said. Apologizing unnecessarily, he spoke to me and another journalist between calls and text messages as his mobile phone rang and vibrated continuously. "Every minute, children, food, animals … If I run out of battery, hundreds of people …" Pertsoivskyi had to take another call before he could finish the thought.

Station masters and officials, aid workers, and diplomats all had requests, and each one was urgent. Meanwhile, more than a million people have been on the move in Ukraine – a country that's roughly the size of Texas – as one of the largest migrations of displaced persons and soon-to-be refugees in recent memory continues. Many more are expected to try to flee as the situation remains in flux.

While some have left the country by car, others fear running out of fuel or being surrounded by Russian forces. And most people don't own cars. So, Ukrzaliznytsia's trains have been packed. Lviv's station normally handles 5,000-6,000 people a day, but in recent days it's been as much as 10 times that. Where possible, the trains return back east, toward Kyiv and the rest of the country, carrying aid. "We have trains going to Poland. It would be a waste of resources to bring them back empty," he said. "Load them up."

Ukraine's rail network is extensive, and Pertsoivskyi says they've been able to cram as many as 6,000 travelers onto a single train. They have also suspended regular ticketing. He described some of their difficulties: an unexploded bomb fell next to tracks. He said, "It's my decision to let a train move people or not. We had to close that sector; luckily in this case we could re-route. It might be a difficult decision."

Also, he said, "Last night I got a call from an intercity train" – the fastest and most reliable way to get from Kyiv and Lviv – "facing damaged tracks. Fortunately, resolved." Some issues are more intractable: "There's an oncology center in Kyiv with disabled kids – but we can't control the first and last mile." They have to rely on local volunteers for road transport to get people to the train stations. And, "our highest capacity trains are double decker. But they could become targets" due to their size.

They're also facing pressure from embassies of foreign countries to evacuate their citizens. "We have limited capacity. It can be a choice between our people and expatriates, but we try to accommodate. Because it's not only our people under attack, but all civilians. It's an attack on civilians from all over the world," he said. Pertsoivskyi had praise for some of his counterparts: "In bad times, our friends are tested. The Ministry of Infrastructure of Poland called and simplified the customs procedures." Still, he said, "people have to wait a few days." The railroad's "women and children" first policy has also contributed to the confusion at some stops, as well as African and Asian students being forced to wait hours for the chance to board. After complaints about the situation went viral on social media, many of those students reported that they had been able to leave the country.

Pertsoivskyi – 36 years old, multi-lingual, and the father of a young child – grew up in the town of Severodonetsk in the contested Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine. He was a Fulbright scholar and studied at Brandeis University, near Boston, and later lived and worked in Singapore. But he came back, he said, "because Ukraine started to change. I could have been far away from all this."

After the bombardment began, Pertsoivskyi said he and his colleagues struggled with the decision to leave Kyiv. "Emotionally we all wanted to stay. But there's limited value in sitting in a shelter," he said. "Being with the people – I want to look in your eyes and say that I was with you. I want to be in the front line, but also you don't want to end your life," he says, and adds: "The first railroad worker was killed today."

During a particularly stressful phone call from Kharkiv under fire, Pertsoivskyi turned to us and said, "I used to move tourists."

A Mobile Command

At a small-town train station, Pertsoivskyi, an urban professional in casual clothes without insignia, looked like such an unlikely railroad baron that he had to explain to the police who he was when they found the presence of American journalists curious. A group of armed railroad staff also arrived with helmets and body armor.

They also brought a gray cardboard box – one of the first Starlink high-speed satellite internet dishes that Elon Musk donated to Ukraine. It had taken only a few days from promise to delivery. Using the system could be risky, since it could create a way for the Russians to track their location. But it also offers a critical back-up in case existing mobile and landline phone and data systems go down. Thus far, Ukraine's communications have proven robust, with service maintained in much of the country.

Soon after, we boarded a train to meet Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukrzaliznytsia's CEO. Kamyshin, a tall man in a black jacket and hair pulled back in what he calls "Viking" style, cuts a striking figure. He's the father of two young sons, Andrey and Arkadiy, and has only been on the job for six months, still without an official contract or salary. In his previous lives he'd studied at INSEAD in France, owned a large media company, and been an investment manager for Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov's SCM group.

Once we were aboard, he made a point of introducing us first to Natalia Zapolska, the human resources director of the railroad. She is the only woman with this traveling team, and he explained that Zapolska had volunteered to take care of the ordinary but essential task of keeping them all fed and hydrated.

President Zelensky made himself a powerful symbol of resistance by remaining in the capital Kyiv, famously telling the American government offering him evacuation that "I need ammunition, not a ride." But for practical as well as security reasons, the senior management of many of Ukraine's essential services needed to disperse as soon as the war started, if they were to keep those services operational under severe stress.

Sitting next to the driver at the front of the train, Kamyshin consulted with various department heads as the train hurtled through the countryside at 100 miles an hour, at times – our journey punctuated by the sound of loud horns, cackling radio traffic, and the sights of dispatch and station personnel with their different colored batons at regular intervals. It was a reminder that Ukraine combines both elements of the 21st century cosmopolitan internationalism that it wants to join, growing a burgeoning tech sector and empowering these young executives with their foreign educations and claims to clean up corruption, with an older, almost nostalgia-tinged Europe of telegraph wires, semaphore signals, and vanished empires.

Laying a large map onto a table, Kamyshin described what the railroad had experienced since the war began a long six days before. "Officially, there was an evacuation process from Luhansk and Donetsk [the long-contested areas in eastern Ukraine]. Unofficially, when they started bombing Kyiv, the city didn't announce an evacuation. But we've moved over 900,000 people from Ukraine's top ten cities alone, including Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, Dnipro, and Zaporizhia, on hundreds of trains. We've lost comfort because we're letting them all in, double and triple capacity. But we gain safety – we've slowed the trains down, because if something happens [to an overcrowded train] at 60 kilometers per hour instead of 80, a lot fewer people will get hurt. We established teams moving across the country. In the last two days I've been in more than 10 locations. I have 231,000 people, and they're fine to go and work without sleep -- but I have to show them that I'm with them."

"If bombing is happening on the route of a train," he continued, "if we lose any segment, if we lose a city, you can't use it, we have to cancel. No infrastructure was ever really developed for wartime." Unsurprisingly, Ukrzaliznytsia is running without a regular schedule. Each evening at 9 pm they announce the arrangements for the next day and keep adjusting it as needed.

Reporting directly to Minister of Infrastructure Oleksandr Kubrakov and to President Zelensky, Kamyshin said that "when we went to Kyiv, we came under fire with missiles flying across the tracks. We were lucky. He told us that the army and the railroads are the most important structures in Ukraine right now." Kamyshin said that military and civilian trains are kept strictly apart, but they do share the same tracks and the military has the highest priority for locomotives, rolling stock, and schedules. He also admitted that the prewar connections with neighboring countries were "miserable." There was no passenger service to Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, or Moldova, and only a limited shuttle to Poland. Establishing and expanding those connections suddenly became pivotal.

Despite the exigencies of wartime, some meals were served on ceramic plates and eaten with metal silverware, though most were far more modest, grabbed as they could on the go. Late in the afternoon, the whole group sat down for what they perhaps hoped would be a proper supper, reminiscent of a dining car in peacetime. But when the station master from Kharkiv called, Pertsoivskyi put him on speakerphone. With Ukraine's second largest city under heavy shelling and rising civilian casualties, all were concerned that it might be the last day to get people out of Kharkiv. There were at least 30,000 people at the Kharkiv station.

"Bring them out to Poltava [a city 90 miles west of Kharkiv] and we'll have food and water," Pertsoivskyi said. The station master pushed back, saying that "people won't go if it's just Poltava, it's too close." Pertsoivskyi tried to convince him, "if we try to bring them all to Lviv directly it will take three weeks. Let's fast track them to Poltava, at least they can get humanitarian aid in Poltava. Anyway, they can leave the shooting and go to Poltava, or, what? Stay?" They decided to try it, with the caveat that "if we see that nobody goes from Kharkiv to Poltava, then we can reassess."

Ukrzalinytsia also made available refrigerator cars for the Ukrainian Army to transport the bodies of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine back to Russia, but thus far, they haven't received a response from the Russian side. "They don't care," Kamyshin said, "tomorrow I'll ask volunteers to help our army with loading. Then we will carry these refrigerated cars to Russia."

Kamyshin introduced some of the members of his team in turn almost like a band leader giving a shout out to each musician after their solo: Slava Babak on security and connectivity, Viacheslav Yeromin on freight and cargo, Vladimir Krot on safety, Natalia Zapolska again, and several others who wished not to be named.

With diverse backgrounds from all over Ukraine, including regions under current attack, they spoke both Ukrainian and Russian interchangeably. If Kamyshin and Pertsoivskyi are exemplars of an emerging young Ukraine oriented towards the west, the others are clearly long-serving professional railroad personnel, in khaki uniforms rather than civilian clothes, sometimes with grim countenances as each new report of a crisis or problem came in.

Yeromin focused on how important it was to secure supplies for fuel, both for rail operations and the entire country. "Before, 80% of our gas and fuel came from Belarus and Russia. Now we have to replace it from Europe. And that's not so easy, but thanks to our neighbors we're able to transfer gas and petrol. We'll be receiving oil from the Czech Republic through Slovakia." Food, of course, was on the top of the list too, not just bringing it in but getting it out, because "before, we had 2000 hoppers a day filled with grain going to the seaports because 90% of our grain is for export. Now the ports are closed, so the logistics also have to shift to Europe." He detailed how they were bringing coal to power plants, and their new mission of facilitating humanitarian aid flowing in from Katowice and Krakow in Poland.

"I'm responsible for all the trains moving safely," Krot said, "but now we don't have the old easy ways to fix things. Tracks are damaged by shooting, bridges blown up, signal systems damaged. Bullets have hit locomotives. We've had casualties. These are all direct dangers to transportation, but we've maintained control of the technical infrastructure."

Babak, a former military officer, said, "My biggest concern is that a passenger train gets hit and people die. What upsets me most is that our partners that we trusted, when we gave up our nuclear weapons, didn't live up to their promises." Then he asked me what wars I had covered before, and when I told him, he looked at me with a kind of weary camaraderie. "None of them were like this. And right now, the Russians are trying to cut the route from Kharkiv. They're razing Kharkiv, the city of my birth. They're trying to erase it to zero."

During a brief stop in Ternopil where Kamyshin had a conference call with the top managers of Ukraine's six regional railroads, Babak saw his wife and children for a few brief minutes. They had driven for 48 hours after escaping the fierce battle raging in Kharkiv. When it was time to leave, I watched him embrace each of them in turn on the station platform, and then he climbed back on board and waved to them from the window of the train car's door until they were out of his sight. He stayed at the window for what seemed like a long time but was probably just a few moments, as the train sped up and continued our journey across the winter landscape of a nation at war for its very existence.

"This story is about each single railway man," Kamyshin said. "We are structured; we are disciplined. None of us loses control. I haven't seen a single railway man lose control. These people have iron nerves."

"I'm here to help my country," Zapolska said, assisted only by one young steward in making tea and coffee and heating up meals, "so that someday my child won't have to be scared of explosions. A small step towards victory. It breaks my heart to see everything that's happening."

Both Putin and Biden and their advisers, for entirely different reasons, thought that Ukraine would only survive for a day or two or three at most under a concerted Russian invasion on multiple fronts. The one might be guided by imperial ambitions to restore the USSR and buoyed by successes in Syria and Georgia, the other traumatized by the collapse of American backed armies in Kabul and Mosul. Both may have forgotten that Ukraine is a nation state with advanced infrastructure and functioning structures, with its own military-industrial complex – and one of the world's leading railroad systems that has continued running trains across much of its prewar 14,000 miles of track.

It was late at night when we got off at Zhmerynka, a small town in central Ukraine several hundred miles from where we had started. Kamyshin and his team disappeared towards their next undisclosed locations, which he later told me included "visiting the Odessa and Dnepr regional branches, to show support to regional managers." We waited for the train back to Lviv in an ornate waiting room where Tsar Nicholas II had once been welcomed with bread and salt over a hundred years ago. It began to snow, as the blacked-out train raced through darkness only occasionally broken by trackside lights that illuminated the snowflakes and the dusting on the ground.

Alan Chin is a photographer and a regular contributor to Insider.

More of Alan Chin's reporting from Ukraine:

Inside a basement crypt that's become a Ukrainian bomb shelter

'It's impossible to explain what happens in your soul': A view from Ukraine's exodus to escape the Russian invasion'

Waiting for war in Kharkiv, Ukraine

A view from Ukraine's front line: 8 miles away is still too close, as shelling hits near a school