CZECH REPUBLIC: On the 12th night of the war, on a platform at Prague’s central train station, Vitali Slobodianiuk and Volodymyr Kotsyuba met for the first time.
They had few things in common: Both were Ukrainians working in construction sites in the Czech Republic. On that frigid evening, both got on a train back to Ukraine to join the fight against Russia’s invading army.
Slobodianiuk, a 47-year-old former soldier, and Mr Kotsyuba, a 35-year-old university graduate, shared a neat compartment on the sleeper train from Prague to the Polish-Ukrainian border town of Przemysl, sticking together, even though most carriages were virtually empty. “We’re sort of friends now,” Kotsyuba chuckled.
The train, run by a Czech private operator, RegioJet, was on a special mission that night, and every night. It carried humanitarian aid to the border, as well as a handful of people – volunteer fighters and Prague-based Ukrainians rushing to the Polish-Ukrainian border to collect fleeing family members.
On the way back, it took refugees into the heart of Europe, away from Ukraine and the war, and deeper into open-ended displacement.
Europe’s trains and railways boomed in wartimes past. From the second half of the 19th century onward, trains carried soldiers to and from the front lines, supplied armies in combat and grew to meet the needs of the continent’s defining conflicts.
– THE STRAITS TIMES