At 3:45 in the morning on September 13, a Ukrainian railway official woke me with one urgent Ukrainian word: Evacuatia.

I was on a train from Kyiv to Poland. There was no time to dress, so I joined the stream of passengers pouring out of the train in my cotton nightgown and slippers.

It was pitch black.

It wasn’t enough to be off the train. We needed distance from the carriages to be safe from drone shrapnel. The ground was uneven, and I held onto the arm of a tall man because, under the circumstances, falling seemed an especially bad idea.

I’m 85, and this was my seventh reporting trip to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion. I’ve been in places where the air-raid sirens sound so often that people barely look up. I’ve interviewed torture survivors, amputees and children whose education is repeatedly interrupted by races to bomb shelters.

Still, until Sunday morning, I had never had to run from a Russian drone myself. The alarm was well-judged: we soon heard the thud of an explosion and later learned that it had hit the railroad track behind us. One passenger, a former member of the CIA, estimated that it was between 100 and 200 meters away. 

After perhaps 20 minutes outside, we were given the all-clear and returned to the train.

My train was carrying Gen. David Petraeus, the former CIA director and commander of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. A diplomatic train carrying former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt and other prominent visitors had traveled through the same area shortly before.

Ukrainian Railways told me the attacks were aimed at the Bildt/Johnson train. It’s hard to be sure, but we do know that on September 2, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russia’s security council and leader of Putin’s political party, made a clear threat against foreigners visiting Kyiv.

Angered by Ukraine’s increasingly effective strikes across Russia, Medvedev said Western leaders were behind the campaign.

“Every act of terror has its sponsors,” he wrote on Telegram. “At the moment, these are the leaders of Western countries, primarily European ones. And they often travel to Kyiv by train . . . ”

Back on the tracks, the situation was about to get worse.

The train moved forward and then, I can only guess how long the interval was, maybe half an hour, the train stopped, and we were told again to evacuate. This time I was dressed.

The second evacuation was more urgent. We got out and moved away from the train, and then came an enormous boom nearby.

There was acrid smoke, enough that I began coughing and my lungs were burning. At the time, in the darkness and confusion, I thought the smoke was coming from a church near the railway. Later, after seeing photographs taken by people traveling with me, I learned I was wrong: the strike had hit the engine of a train that was parked adjacent to us. There were several passenger trains and two fuel-tank trains bunched up and not moving because of drone activity.

Then came the third attack, and it was hair-raisingly different.

Suddenly you could tell from the conductor’s voice that this time was truly urgent. I’m told that officials know from radar and other sources how far drones are, and in this case, everyone was shouting: “Run! Run!”

I remember thinking that I could grab a blanket because it was cold outside. It would have taken three seconds.

I didn’t take the three seconds.

We ran.

We were told that the objective was to get at least 200 meters from the train and more would be far better. We crossed a wet, marshy field, in places running over old wooden planks that were beginning to rot.

Then we heard the drone.

I have trouble describing that sound without resorting to something unjournalistic like “the world’s nastiest sound.” It reminded me of the sound of angry hornets. It was approaching and getting louder.

We kept running.

My lungs began burning. Then they felt as if they were bursting. Eventually I couldn’t keep up with the others, but I was still moving forward. I had always imagined that with enough adrenaline you could do anything, but there came a point where I just couldn’t keep up.

We reached the shore of a lake, and passengers scattered into nearby bushes and shrubbery.

The idea was to crouch low, both to make ourselves less visible and to reduce our exposure to shrapnel if something exploded nearby. Had we been out in the open on the lakeshore, the advice was to lie flat and present as small a target as possible.

So there we were, passengers from an international train crouching under bushes at dawn while Russian drones flew overhead.

Some people were crying.

Several small terrier-sized dogs looked as if they understood perfectly well that something was terribly wrong.

My traveling companion Clara asked me if I was cold.

Until she mentioned it, I hadn’t noticed the cold at all.

At one point, two young women remained standing while the rest of us were crouched down, making ourselves invisible in the bushes. People began shouting at them in Ukrainian to sit.

I don’t know enough Ukrainian to translate their exact words, but I understood the tone.

It was not: “Would you mind sitting down?”

Eventually a drone passed us. We heard another explosion and later learned that it had been intercepted by Ukrainian forces.

A locomotive on the tracks adjacent to the carriage Gen. Petraeus and I had been traveling in had been hit. Railway tracks were damaged. A gas station or gas storage facility close to us was hit and exploded. Another Russian strike hit near the border crossing. The crossing with Poland was closed for at least six hours, leaving passenger trains backed up close to one another. On parallel tracks beside us stood two long freight trains made up of tank cars.

For anyone who has traveled regularly in wartime Ukraine, the railway is a lifeline.

Ukraine’s airspace is closed to normal civilian flights, which means the trains are the main way of connecting Ukraine with Europe. Ukrainians use them to visit family, travel to work or flee danger. Diplomats, aid workers, journalists and foreign supporters use them to enter the country.

One purpose of attacking that corridor seems obvious, whatever the intended individual target may have been: make people afraid to use it.

Make foreigners reluctant to enter Ukraine.

Make Ukrainians feel increasingly cut off from Europe.

Make the danger seem to extend right up to NATO’s doorstep.

When we finally crossed the border into Poland, a Polish border guard spoke to me in a friendly way. “I bet you won’t be taking that train again,” he said.

“Yes, I will,” I answered. “As soon as I possibly can.” 

Later, I talked with fellow passengers about what the attacks meant and how serious an escalation they represented.

We use the phrase “hybrid warfare.” But passengers who were part of the conversation agreed that we should remember the second word, “warfare”. Why are we so afraid of Putin that we hesitate to take seriously what is happening in front of us?

Russian drones have just attacked a civilian rail corridor carrying grandmothers and children. On my train, the passengers were almost all women. The passengers crouching in those bushes were not soldiers. We were people trying to get from Ukraine to Poland.

This is now increasingly common as Russia hits trains across the country, used by ordinary people to go about their business. Like the strikes on apartment blocks, shopping malls and buses, the growing aim is to kill and terrorize the civilian population.

There is an old warning: “He who endures an old injury with restraint invites a new one.”

There is something Congress can do about it right now, as opposed to enduring what Russia is doing without a serious response. The Senate has already passed the Lindsey Graham Russia sanctions legislation by an overwhelming 86–11 vote, and the House Rules Committee is scheduled to consider it. The House should pass it.

Putin has just given us another demonstration of what we are up against.

It is time for us to get serious and do something about it.

Mitzi Perdue is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). She holds a BA from Harvard University and an MPA from the George Washington University. As a journalist and war correspondent, she has reported extensively from Ukraine and is the co-founder of Mental Help Global, an initiative using AI to expand access to mental health support in conflict-affected regions.

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.