The railway station in Kostiantynivka, a mid-sized industrial city just 10 kilometers from the eastern frontline, was transformed from a bustling evacuation hub into a scene of carnage yesterday morning. I arrived three hours after Russian Shahed drones slammed into the station platform where hundreds of civilians had gathered for the 10:30 train to Kyiv.
“We were standing right there, just waiting to board,” Olena Petrenko told me, her face still streaked with dust and someone else’s blood. The 62-year-old grandmother had been attempting to evacuate with her daughter and two grandchildren after weeks of intensified shelling in their neighborhood. “There was no warning. Just a flash and then screaming.”
Ukrainian officials report at least 27 people were injured in what President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called a “savage strike” on the crowded civilian infrastructure. Among the wounded were four children and a pregnant woman, according to Vadym Filashkin, governor of the Donetsk region, who shared these details on his Telegram channel.
The attack comes amid a significant escalation in Russia’s aerial campaign against Ukrainian civilian targets. Just last week, Moscow launched its largest drone swarm yet, with over 188 Iranian-designed Shahed drones targeting multiple regions across Ukraine. Ukrainian air defenses claimed to have downed 87 of them, but many still found their targets.
At the Kostiantynivka station, emergency workers were still clearing debris when I spoke with Dr. Iryna Kovalchuk, who had been treating the wounded since the first moments after the attack. “The injuries are consistent with what we’ve seen before – shrapnel wounds, blast trauma, severe burns,” she explained, her surgical mask still speckled with blood. “But what makes this different is how calculated it was. The platform was full of people trying to escape the fighting.”
The timing of the strike has raised serious questions about Russian intelligence operations. The 10:30 train to Kyiv has served as a well-known evacuation route for months. Local military administrator Oleksandr Havrilenko suggests this was precisely why it was targeted. “This wasn’t random. The occupiers know exactly when civilians gather here,” he said while overseeing the distribution of emergency supplies.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022, railway stations have become critical lifelines for millions of displaced Ukrainians. The Ukrainian rail system has evacuated an estimated 4 million civilians, according to the state railway company Ukrzaliznytsia, making it both a humanitarian marvel and a strategic target.
What makes yesterday’s attack particularly troubling is the use of Shahed drones, which military analysts have noted are increasingly deployed against civilian rather than military targets. “The Shaheds are relatively inaccurate for hitting tactical military targets,” explained Colonel Mykhailo Prytula, a Ukrainian military expert I’ve consulted with throughout the conflict. “But they’re perfect for creating terror at civilian gathering points. They’re loud, slow, and psychologically devastating.”
Walking through the damaged station hall, I saw the evidence of lives disrupted in an instant – abandoned suitcases, a child’s stuffed bear soaked in water from emergency hoses, a row of phones charging at a station that now had no owners to claim them.
Across the street, local volunteers had established an impromptu relief center in a former school. Tetiana Morozova, who coordinates civil defense operations in Kostiantynivka, handed me a stack of handwritten evacuation lists. “We had 217 people registered for today’s trains,” she said. “Mostly women, children, and elderly. The people who couldn’t fight but couldn’t stay either.”
The Russian Ministry of Defense has not commented specifically on the Kostiantynivka station strike. However, Moscow has repeatedly claimed it targets only military infrastructure, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary documented by the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine.
For the residents of Donetsk oblast, this latest attack reinforces the impossible choices they face daily. “If we stay, we might die from shelling. If we try to leave, we might die at the station,” said Viktor Lysenko, a 58-year-old factory worker who came to search for his neighbor after the attack. “But we can’t just disappear. We are still here.”
By evening, railway workers had already begun repairs to ensure evacuation trains could resume the following day. The resilience was striking, but so was the normalization of horror. As one station worker told me while sweeping broken glass: “We’ll clean up, and they’ll hit us again. But between those times, we’ll get as many people out as we can.”
In Brussels next week, NATO defense ministers will discuss expanding air defense systems for Ukraine. For the people I met in Kostiantynivka yesterday, such decisions can’t come soon enough.
