The Railway War

The story of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and increasingly the counter offensive, can be seen from the perspective of the railway, shedding new light on its importance and vulnerability.

Ukraine’s rail sovereignty

Ukraine’s railway and its sovereignty have long been entwined. Railways appeared in the 19th century, when Western Ukraine was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and this part of the country’s track was therefore built to standard track gauge, easing transport of people and goods with Western Europe. However, Eastern Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire and was built to the wider Russian standard gauge.

After the Second World War - in an important mark of sovereignty and control - the Soviet administration converted almost all Ukraine’s railways to Russian gauge. At the start of the invasion of Ukraine the railway was therefore seen by Vladimir Putin as an asset to be used to allow rapid movement of men and materiel into the country, in order to overthrow the elected government in Kyiv and reunite the country as ‘one people’ with what he asserts is its rightful Russian owner.

The outset of the war

When Russian troops came through Belarus, to attack Ukraine’s capital from the North, Belarusian anti-government partisans and railway workers quickly spotted the attacker’s strategic weakness. They sabotaged their own railway, slowing the arrival of troops and helping Ukraine to repel the invasion. This resistance spread to the Belarussian cyber partisans too, who undertook technical sabotage of the railways online.

Russia quickly responded with its own attack on the railway. As large numbers of Ukrainians sought sanctuary in other parts of Europe its railway stations were flooded with would-be refugees. At this time Russia launched a number of rocket attacks on busy stations: Over fifty people were killed in Kramatorsk in April. At the time Russian authorities denied that these attacks were deliberately targeting civilians, but subsequent events would show these denials to be hollow.

The tussle for control

Battles continued to focus on railway centres and the destruction of critical supply lines. Five stations were hit within an hour of each other at the end of April and a Russian missile struck railway infrastructure in the key rail hub of Lviv in May in an attempt to limit military supplies and humanitarian aid from Poland.

In early September, Ukrainian forces launched a major counter-offensive in the east and northeast. Within a month its forces had retaken control of the city of Lyman - a critical railway junction in the east of the country - which had been a major logistics hub for the Russian army.

Then, dramatically, there was an attack on the Kerch bridge which connects Crimea to Russia. Several spans of the road bridge were destroyed, and fuel tank wagons on the adjacent rail line were set on fire. Russian media quickly cited the cause as being a truck bomb, but there is still a lack of clarity around precisely what happened. The rail bridge was reported to have reopened within twenty-four hours of the attack, but with traffic using a single track. The incident highlighted the vulnerability of the bridge to potential future attacks: an affront that the Kremlin felt it could not ignore.

Critical infrastructure

Putin’s escalation was to promote the ‘Butcher of Syria’, Sergey Surovikin, to the command: a man who had made his name bombing Aleppo to ruins in the Syrian Civil War. In actions condemned as war crimes, Surovikin launched missile and kamikaze drone attacks on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, in many cases far from the front line. By targeting power generation and distribution networks, Russia’s goal is to freeze the war weary civilian population into submission as the bitter Ukrainian winter arrives. The resulting protective measures, to ration consumption nationally, have required a reduction in some urban transport services.

Spreading outside its borders

At the end of September the Nord Stream undersea gas pipelines were both — if reports are to be believed - damaged by bombs, severing a major route for importing gas from Russia to Germany. Cutting through the diplomatic wording that followed, it is a working assumption of most that Russia was behind the attacks. The German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that the CIA had warned the German government of possible sabotage to the pipelines weeks beforehand. The motive for this action was surmised to be to send a message to Ukraine’s Western backers that their critical national infrastructure is vulnerable, and fair game. Other acts suspected of being part of this campaign included the cutting of undersea cables to the Shetland isles.

Two weeks later, the railways themselves became a target when regional and long-distance services in Northern Germany were disrupted for several hours. Investigators found that communication cables were cut at two related, critical locations, one outside Berlin and one in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia in what German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said must be assumed to be “intentional acts."

Sabotage breeds sabotage

With the battle turning against Russia, Putin initiated a draft of the civilian population at the end of September, a deeply unpopular move which threatened the informal contract by which he rules. Disaffection has grown as stories of chaos and poor supplies have spread, and is now so high that Russians themselves have become bold enough to sabotage the trains bringing newly mobilised soldiers and supplies to the front line. An anti-war activist group, Stop the Wagons has claimed responsibility for many such attacks including one at Novozybkov in October, which severed an important rail route from Russia to southern Belarus.

The outcome of this terrible invasion is still to be determined, but one thing that is certain is that the railway will continue to be central to the conflict.

The next issue

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Thanks for reading

All views here are my own. Please feel free to feed back any thoughts or comments and please do feel free to drop me an e-mail on george.bearfield@ntlworld.com: My particular area of professional and research interest is practical risk management and assurance of new technology. I’m always keen to engage on interesting projects in this area.

The photo used on social media is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license and is by Terek.