“It was really important to us, even if it was naive,” Alexander Kamyshin told CNN on Wednesday.
Kamyshin, the top leader of the national rail system, called the move naïve, as a delegation of EU leaders announced their travel plans while they were still on their way to the capital.
Kyiv has been terrorized by a campaign of Russian airstrikes that have hit residential areas in recent days, including several apartment buildings, triggering a 35-hour curfew that began Tuesday night.
The Ukrainian rail system is not immune from these strikes. But on Tuesday morning, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced that he, along with Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansza and Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, was heading to Kyiv.
“I kept their secret, but when I saw that something was published on the Internet, it surprised me. I didn’t understand this,” Kamyshin told CNN.
Along the way, Morawiecki wrote on Facebook: “Our duty is to be where history is made. It’s not about us, it’s about the future of our children, who deserve to live in a world free from tyranny.”
Fiala also tweeted that “the purpose of the visit is to reaffirm the unconditional support of the entire European Union for the sovereignty and independence of Ukraine.”
Security concerns haunted the 37-year-old railroad executive from the start of the war.
Kamyshin and his top deputies have spent the last three weeks touring the country, managing 321,000 railroad employees and some 1,450 stations along the way. He believes that running the railroad is a target for Russian bombs, so staying in near-constant movement is a matter of personal safety.
“Even my children, I don’t tell them: “Hey, do not reveal your whereabouts,” because everyone should understand that this is a war. I cannot give instructions to prime ministers,” he said.
According to Kamyshin, it was the prime ministers’ idea to travel to Kyiv by train, believing it to be the safest mode of transport.
He agreed despite the fact that on Wednesday morning a Russian bomb hit a train station in Zaporozhye shortly after their visit, leaving a funnel-sized hole in the train tracks and damaging the train station.
“Any smart person these days would prefer a train to a car,” he said. “Even with bombing everywhere, stations and trains are now the safest places in the country.”
Kamyshin said that the delegation was traveling on a special train with four of the railway’s newest sleeping cars. The only other passengers were part of the delegation or security.
“It was an ordinary, normal train with ordinary cars,” he said. “So [the delegation’s route] was no more special than the others. … It was the same route that ordinary passengers take.”
The trip took about eight or nine hours, he said. The leaders spent several hours with Zelenskiy and his team before taking an overnight train back to Poland.
“For me, the best estimate of railways would be if foreign prime ministers choose railways over cars, helicopters or any other option,” he said.