Russian troops carried out about 1,200 combined strikes on Ukraine’s railway infrastructure in 2025, which is one of the three key problems of the season for agricultural exports, said Valery Tkachov, deputy director of the commercial department of Ukrzaliznytsia (UZ).
“The most painful thing for us is that our employees are dying under enemy fire. More than 1,000 railway workers have already been killed during the full-scale war. This is the most difficult challenge, which cannot be measured only by technical indicators,” he said at the Forbes Agro conference in Kyiv on Thursday.
Tkachov named security as the first systemic problem. Last year alone, the enemy carried out 1,200 attacks on railway energy facilities, rolling stock, and control centers in an attempt to completely stop the movement of export cargo.
Tkachov named the second critical problem as restrictions on the external power supply to the network due to strikes on the energy sector, which directly reduces the throughput capacity of key trunk lines. In particular, after the shelling of the Kolosivsky passage in the south and the Kamyanets-Podilsky junction in the west, Ukrzaliznytsia was forced to switch to the use of diesel locomotives on a massive scale.
This leads to a significant slowdown in train traffic, restrictions on train weight, and an increase in transportation costs due to the high cost of diesel fuel compared to electricity. The third set of problems in the work of Ukrzaliznytsia, according to Tkachov, covers economic and political barriers.
This particularly concerns restrictions on western land crossings from neighboring countries and low demand for Danube ports. Despite the availability of alternative routes through Reni and Izmail, agribusiness still prefers the ports of Greater Odessa, which creates an uneven load on the infrastructure.
The deputy director of the UZ department assured that the railway network remains stable, but its efficiency is still critically dependent on the stability of the power system and the security situation on the southern approaches to sea terminals.
