Russia struck train near Poland border shortly after Boris Johnson and top European officials passed through

A Russian strike hit the engine of a train near the Ukraine‑Poland border shortly after former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and several senior European officials, including his adviser Jonathan Powell, had passed through the same area on their way back from a meeting in Kyiv. No casualties were reported in the attack. Johnson criticised the strike, saying, “I don’t know what warped logic drove Putin to strike up a stationary Ukrainian locomotive on the Polish border this morning,” and added, “When are we going to give them the aerial defences they need?” Russia said on Sunday it had targeted “railway infrastructure” in western Ukraine. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said a Russian drone struck a point 800 metres from the Polish border. The attack fits a pattern of Russian assaults on Ukraine’s rail system. Earlier this month, six employees of the state railway company Ukrzaliznytsia were killed when a depot in Kyiv was hit. This week a female conductor died in a drone strike on a passenger train in southern Ukraine. In January, President Volodymyr Zelensky labelled as “terrorism” a Russian attack on a crowded passenger train in the northeastern Kharkiv region that left five people dead. Ukrainian officials say the repeated strikes have severely damaged the country’s extensive rail network, which remains the main means of transport for millions of civilians. Air travel has been suspended since the start of Russia’s full‑scale invasion in 2022, leaving railways as a critical lifeline.