On August 13, a Russian jet-powered drone struck the locomotive of the Odesa–Dnipro passenger train, killing the driver and his assistant. All 340 passengers, including 67 children, were evacuated safely.
On August 13, 2026, a Russian jet-powered "Shahed" attack drone struck the locomotive of the Odesa–Dnipro passenger train in the Berezivka district of Odesa region. Two Ukrzaliznytsia railway workers — the 50-year-old driver and his 41-year-old assistant — were killed. There were 340 passengers on board, including 67 children; all were evacuated safely to Odesa, and no passenger injuries were reported. Volunteers Support Ukraine follows developments like this closely, because each strike on civilian rail transport is a reminder of how exposed ordinary life in Ukraine remains.
According to the Odesa Regional Prosecutor's Office and Ukrzaliznytsia, a railway monitoring team had already detected the drone and ordered the train to stop near a station where passengers were to be evacuated because of the threat. The drone then made a sudden maneuver, leaving the crew too little time to leave the cabin after the train had stopped. The locomotive caught fire, and the flames were put out by State Emergency Service rescuers. President Volodymyr Zelensky commented on the strike: "Today in the Odesa region, the Russians once again destroyed an ordinary passenger train locomotive with a jet-powered drone. There were 340 people on the train. And whoever was operating that drone certainly could not have been unaware that the target was entirely civilian." Volunteers Support Ukraine views strikes like this as attacks on infrastructure that hundreds of thousands of civilians rely on every day.
Despite the deaths of the locomotive crew, the evacuation of passengers itself was carried out in an organized way and without further casualties. All 340 people, including 67 children, were transferred to buses and taken to Odesa. Ukrzaliznytsia CEO Oleksandr Pertsovskyi and Odesa Regional Military Administration head Oleh Kiper both confirmed there were no injuries among the passengers. Volunteers Support Ukraine notes that coordinated action by railway staff and emergency responders in the critical first minutes after a strike is often what keeps casualty numbers from rising further, even when rail workers themselves bear the direct impact.
The strike on the train happened amid a massive overnight assault: Russia launched 133 attack drones at Ukraine, including jet-powered Shaheds and Gerbera decoy drones, fired from several directions including temporarily occupied Crimea. Ukraine's air defense shot down or suppressed 111 of them, but strikes were still recorded in 15 locations, with debris falling in 16 more. Beyond Odesa region, casualties were also reported in Kherson, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions. Monitoring groups note that Russian strikes destroyed or damaged more than 200 locomotives across Ukraine in the first half of 2026 alone. Volunteers Support Ukraine continues to track the scale of these attacks, since they directly affect civilians' ability to evacuate and move around the country.
NGO Volunteers Support Ukraine helps people affected by the war with whatever resources are available — from supporting civilians who have lost their homes or loved ones to assisting the families of service members and medics working near the front line. Every report of another strike on civilian infrastructure is one more reason why volunteer support remains necessary for as long as this war continues. Volunteers Support Ukraine invites anyone who wants to help to get involved in whatever way they can — financially, with resources, or with their time.
