‘Rail Force One’: how Ukraine railways got Joe Biden safely to Kyiv
A lexander Kamyshin, the head of Ukraine’s railway company Ukrzaliznytsia, doesn’t get much sleep at the best of times. On Sunday night, as Joe Biden was being ferried into Ukraine in a 10-hour night journey from Poland – in a carriage now known as “Rail Force One”, he got almost none.
Along with others involved in the secret operation to bring the US president to his meeting with Volodmyr Zelenskiy, Kamyshin watched the progress of the train in a command centre.
A handsome bearded man sporting a hipster-ish braid of hair that falls over the shaved sides of his head, Kamyshin is deliberately vague about many of the details.
But in the past year, his dedicated team has brought in world leaders, VIPs and diplomatic missions on an almost daily basis as part of a programme called “Iron Diplomacy”.
Security is everything, he told the Guardian in an interview at Kyiv’s main railway station. “We have not had one leak. There have been no photographs from train attendants. We respect the confidence of the delegations.
“It’s not a challenge. It’s our job that we do every day. Imagine,” he says with smile, “the president of the United States coming to a war-torn country by train.
“The challenge is treat the delegations properly because, like Biden, they spend more time on the train than they do in Kyiv. He spent 20 hours on the train and four hours in Kyiv. Everyone knows Ukrainians are brave. We also want them to know that we are welcoming.”
While Kamyshin has said on Twitter he doesn’t “remember how we got from Putin’s idea to ‘take Kyiv in 3 days’ to President #Biden walking across #Kyiv together with my President #Zelenskyy on the 362nd day of the war” intense preparations, including coordination with Biden’s security teams began
Read more on theguardian.com
