Russia Is Targeting Ukraine’s Vital Trains. But Trains, It Turns Out, Are Hard Targets.

Russian and collaborationist officials periodically renew their pledge to destroy Ukrzaliznytsia, most recently in March. “The railways are crucial for the ... regime’s ability to redeploy forces,” Vladimir Rogov, a collaborator in Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia, told Russian state media. But Russia’s spy satellites can’t reliably track the movement of thousands of trains, even when the trains concentrate for a mass haul of Ukrainian troops. In March 2022, trains shifted three or four brigades a day without Russian spacecraft noticing, according to the Royal United Services Institute in London.