Departure time was 11:26 a.m. Track two. Car six. A few hundred people waited on the platform. The train was late and everybody knew it would be. Many looked to be families going home. Children, cats and dogs.
Weeks earlier, when Russian forces launched their assault, the station in Lviv was in a crush of newly created refugees running from the war. They were all heading in the same direction: west.
The 11.26 train was heading east, towards the fighting. To Kyiv, where Ukrainian troops have pushed the Russians back in a spectacular military reversal, just outside the city.
Every liberated village has revealed the tragedy, loss and anguish wrought by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s personal obsession with a country he has long coveted. And now Ukrainians are punished for refusing to become Russian.
Look no further than the lines of body bags in Irpin to confirm what happened in Ukraine over the last month. One suburb away from reaching the country’s capital.
This was not a fast and sleek ride to Kyiv. An hour and a half passed before the train finally started moving out of the station. We used an app to gauge the speed. It clocked in at 50 km/h. The dull brown countryside passed by very slowly in a gentle bumping and squeaking inside the compartment.
You can drive to Kyiv, and people do it all time, but taking the train seemed safer, and even faster. Or so we were advised.
The conductor, a blonde woman in her 50s, brought cups of tea and spoke no English. But she found somebody who did, and informed us the train would not arrive in Kyiv until 10 p.m.
That meant arriving after the beginning of the nightly curfew.
Ukraine has kept its trains running day and night, at a rate and capacity it never thought necessary or possible. It will be chronicled as one of a few monumental achievements that came out of Putin’s aggressive war. With the railway employees duly honoured for their incredible work during dangerous times.
Kyiv under attack, shells hitting a TV tower and apartment blocks, and still the trains came and went, horribly overcrowded and exhaustingly late.
Our train first went northeast to Rivene, and then turned south past what appeared to be a burning fuel depot. It looked as if another missile landed, with a burst of fire, as we slowly made our way forward.
At some point we turned northeast again, which may be when we saw a long column of Ukrainian tanks loaded on rail cars and parked on a siding.
Around dusk, light fading, we made one more pivot, heading due east now, for the last 100 kilometres into Kyiv. The engineer had carefully picked this way around any possible trouble spots. At one point, we came within maybe 60 kilometres of a Russian occupied town.
As the lights in the compartment suddenly came on, the conductor sternly motioned us to lower the window blinds, and pay for our three cups of tea. About 10 cents each.
When we arrived, Kyiv was in near total and precautionary darkness. After the safest and slowest ride to the eastern front.
I ran across a couple of Canadians who appeared to be medics carrying massively big backpacks
“Where are you going?” I asked. “Wherever the hospital sends us,” they replied.
And they were gone, up the darkened steps, through two lines of armed checkpoints, and into the night.
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