Weeks earlier, when Russian forces launched their offensive, the Lviv station was crushed by newly created refugees fleeing the war. Everyone was heading in the same direction: west.
The 11.26 train was heading east, towards the battles. In Kyiv, where Ukrainian troops repulsed the Russians in a spectacular military coup, just outside the city.
Every liberated village has revealed the tragedy, loss and agony caused by the personal obsession of Russian President Vladimir Putin with a country he has long wanted. And now Ukrainians are being punished for refusing to become Russians.
Do not look beyond the rows of bags at Irpin to confirm what happened in Ukraine last month. A suburb away from reaching the country’s capital.
This was not a quick and elegant route to Kyiv. An hour and a half passed before the train finally started leaving the station. We used an application to measure speed. It did 50 km / h. The dull brown countryside passed very slowly with a gentle bang and creak inside the apartment.
You can drive to Kyiv and people do it all the time, but the train seemed safer and even faster. Or so they advised us.
The conductor, a blonde woman in her 50s, brought cups of tea and did not speak English. But he found someone who did and informed us that the train would not arrive in Kyiv until 10 p.m.
That meant I would arrive after the night curfew started.
Ukraine has kept its trains running day and night, at a rate and capacity that it never considered necessary or possible. It will be recorded as one of the few monumental achievements that emerged from Putin’s aggressive war. With railway employees being duly honored for their incredible work in dangerous times.
Kyiv is under attack, shells hit a TV tower and apartment buildings, and yet the trains were coming and going, horribly overcrowded and exhaustingly slow.
Our train first went northeast to Riven and then turned south beyond what appeared to be a fuel depot. It was as if another rocket had landed, with a burst of fire as we moved slowly forward.
At one point we turned northeast again, which can happen when we saw a large column of Ukrainian tanks loaded onto train cars and parked on a detour.
Around dusk, the light goes out, we made another pivot, heading east now, for the last 100 kilometers in Kyiv. The engineer had carefully chosen this way around any possible problem points. At one point, we reached a distance of perhaps 60 kilometers from a Russian occupied city.
As the lights in the apartment suddenly turned on, our conductor nodded sternly to lower the window blinds and pay for our three cups of tea. About 10 cents each.
When we arrived, Kyiv was almost in complete and precautionary darkness. After the safest and slowest walk on the east front.
I ran over some Canadians who seemed to be doctors carrying huge backpacks
“Where are you going?” I asked. “Wherever the hospital sends us,” they replied.
And they were gone, they went up the dark stairs, through two rows of armed checkpoints, and into the night.
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