Vladimir Putin’s escalating attacks on Ukraine’s railways have one clear purpose, including yesterday’s apparently pointless strike that destroyed a stationary civilian shunting locomotive just a mile or so from the Polish border.
After four and a half years of a brutal and unnecessary war—and with 1.5 million Russian personnel lost—the Russian president is becoming increasingly desperate.
Russia is recording unprecedented monthly casualties. More than 40,000 troops were killed or so seriously wounded that they could not return to combat in both July and August.
The country has not suffered losses on this scale since the Second World War. During the decade-long war in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union lost 15,000 men—a toll that helped fuel the eventual collapse of communism.
Putin cannot sustain this pace indefinitely, and he knows it. Russian forces are losing more men, along with North Korean personnel, than the Kremlin can recruit without resorting to a general mobilisation.
The president also knows Russian mothers would resist such a move. They are unlikely to accept an entire generation being sent into the trenches of the Donbas, where Ukrainian drones pursue wounded troops with the relentless inevitability of wolves chasing injured deer.
A stationary civilian shunting locomotive was destroyed yesterday, just a mile or so from the Polish border.
Putin also knows that attitudes are beginning to shift among Moscow’s military commentators. Some of his loudest and most aggressive supporters are now calling for negotiations, alarmed by the effectiveness of Ukrainian drones and the damage inflicted on Russia’s major oil refineries, whose roofs have been torn away like biscuit tins.
Motorists have faced queues lasting hours at petrol stations in one of the world’s leading oil and gas exporters. To make matters worse, 28 per cent of Russian stations reportedly provide fuel of such poor quality that it risks damaging vehicle engines.
There is a limit to how much the Russian public will believe—and to how long the country’s media can maintain the fiction that the war is progressing successfully.
This was meant to be the decisive season of fighting. Instead, Russia’s territorial gains have been negligible, while its forces have even retreated in some areas. Putin is not going to capture the Donbas Fortress Belt without sacrificing millions of troops, nor is he likely to seize the city of Zaporizhiyya. That is why attacks on Ukraine’s railways have intensified, with increasing numbers of missiles aimed at passenger trains in what amount to terror attacks. More strikes on passenger trains have been recorded in the past six months than during the previous four years combined.
The strategy will fail. I know Ukraine’s railway company, Ukrzaliznytsia, well. I have travelled thousands of miles across its network in considerable comfort and passed through that border station shortly before yesterday’s explosion.
The company has already lost 1,700 employees to Putin’s utterly criminal attacks. They are heroes. They will not give in now. They are capable of rebuilding track and bridges with prodigious speed, and the civilian population of passengers continues to show a phlegmatic ability to endure Putin’s blitz. As one Ukrainian woman put it to me at the weekend: ‘It’s terrible to admit this, but we just learn to adapt and get on with our lives.’
The only way to get this foul war over is to show Putin the truth – that he has no chance of winning. That means doing much more to help the Ukrainians.
There have been more attacks on passenger trains in the past six months than in the whole of the preceding four years
This weekend I visited the astonishing Ukrainian drone and missile start-up, Firepoint. They are now world leaders. They make the world’s best cruise missile – the Flamingo, that has been so devastating against Putin’s oil and gas industry.
But now they need to defend the trains and the cities, against Putin’s ballistic missiles, and against the new jet-powered Shaheeds. The Ukrainians desperately need better air defences, and with so many US Patriots being used up in the Gulf region, they have to be helped to make their own.
We need to give them the ‘seeker’ tracking systems to help them to take out Putin’s fast drones and neutralise his intercontinental ballistic missiles. It can be done, but it needs to be done fast.
Ukraine faces a grim winter, in which Putin is plainly going to step up his attempts to kill and terrify civilians – at work, at home, and on their way to work.
In the face of his new cruelty, and his new ruthlessness, we need a new seriousness from the West.
We need to help them to open the Black Sea ports, and get Ukrainian grain and other produce moving again.
We need to give them Starlink access to the skies above Russia, so they can take out the missile sites and bases that are being used to attack their populations.
We need to unfreeze the hundreds of billions of Russian cash – in Brussels and other Western capitals – and allow the Ukrainians to use it to fund their effort.
Putin will squeal. He will accuse the West of escalation – as he has at every stage in this conflict, of which he was the sole author, and which he could end tomorrow.
He will squeal because he is increasingly desperate. In the attacks on passenger trains, we see the bared teeth of a cornered rat. Sooner or later, he knows he will have to desist, and the more pressure we apply now, the sooner that moment will come.
