A Russian drone hits a train at Yahodyn, two kilometres from Poland

A second train was still standing at Yahodyn when the drone arrived. Former CIA director David Petraeus was aboard it.

Ukrzaliznytsia, the Ukrainian state railway operator, said afterwards that it considered the earlier train to have been the target. "It is highly probable that the Russian drone's intended target was in fact the diplomatic train," the operator said.

A locomotive was hit. A truck was also struck less than a mile from Polish territory. There were no reports of casualties on any of the trains.

Bildt described the sequence afterwards. "This wasn't our train, but the one just minutes after us by the Polish border crossing," he said.

Johnson called the attack characteristic of what Ukrainian civilians face routinely, describing it as the kind of "random and senseless attack Ukrainians are enduring every day".

Moscow's account

Russia said it had struck railway infrastructure used to move military cargo. It did not address the presence of the visiting delegation.

Neither outlet reports damage beyond the locomotive and the truck.

Warsaw treats it as an escalation

The station is close enough to Poland that the strike was heard as a NATO question rather than only a Ukrainian one.

Polish prime minister Donald Tusk convened ministers, military commanders and intelligence chiefs. He said he expected Russian escalation in the coming weeks. The border crossing was closed.

Foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski called on Poland's allies to double their support for Ukraine.

Kaja Kallas, the European Union's foreign policy chief, framed the strike as directed at Ukraine's backers rather than at Ukraine alone. "It is clearly meant to scare Western countries from supporting Ukraine," she said.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had struck the locomotive deliberately. He linked the attack to the wider pattern of the war, saying Ukrainian men and women "fight every day", and urged partners not to allow the aggression to expand.

Why the location matters

A strike two kilometres from the border, at a station used by visiting Western politicians, compresses two questions into one: whether the drone was aimed at the delegation, and what the alliance does about a strike that lands that close to its territory.

Neither question was answered. Ukrzaliznytsia stated a probability, not a finding, and Poland announced consultations rather than a response.

What is established is narrow, and worth separating from what is not. A drone hit a train at Yahodyn. Two trains carrying senior Western figures were at the station or had just left it. Nobody was hurt. Poland closed the crossing and put its government into session.

The line the visitors use

The presence of Johnson, Bildt and Petraeus on the same line on the same day is a measure of how routine the journey has become for foreign visitors to Ukraine.

Sunday's strike put the question of that line's safety in front of the governments whose own officials travel on it. Poland closed the border crossing. Neither Warsaw nor Kyiv has said what, if anything, changes about the route.