In August 2021, consultant and entrepreneur Alexander Kamyshin was appointed CEO of the Ukrainian railway company, Ukrzaliznytsia, to transform the country’s largest company and bring it into the modern era. Nothing easy if one takes into account that 90% of the 1,500 trains it operates are from the Soviet era, a time that was also reflected in the tough attitude of its more than 230,000 employees and in more than one corruption scandal.
Kamyshin thus inherited a company that he has no qualms about describing as “shit.” But he couldn’t know that that was going to be the least of his problems. Because, when he had only been in office for six months, Russia invaded the Ukraine. At that time, the dense network of railways, stretching more than 24,000 kilometers, became Ukraine’s lifeline. Millions of refugees have fled in its old convoys, thousands of soldiers are moved to the front lines in operations that it cannot comment on, and the supplies and exports that prevent the collapse of the country’s battered economy are transported.
What’s more, Kamyshin is also in charge of the ‘iron diplomacy’ program, which manages the transport of the 300 top-level diplomatic delegations that, with closed airspace, have traveled to Ukraine on rails in the first year of the invasion. Including the two who have accompanied the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, to kyiv. Or that of his American counterpart, Joe Biden, for whom a train was informally renamed Rail Force One.
“We have had to align security protocols with those of all countries, even with those of Guatemala. Biden’s was a somewhat more complicated case, but we already have enough experience to carry out this transfer successfully. In fact, the US secret service would never have entrusted us with such an operation if they were not fully confident in our capabilities,” says Kamyshin proudly in a VIP room at the Kiev train station.
In one of the few interviews he gives, Kamyshin recounts that the preparation for Biden’s trip took weeks. Despite the magnitude of the operation, we carried it out secretly and without any leaks. Moreover, we have not had a single leak in all the delegations that we have transported. With one exception: when President Zelensky made the first part of his trip to the United States by train. A video was published of him going from the train to a car, but it happened in Poland », he reveals.
In any case, the head of Ukrainian trains emphasizes that all its operations work like a Swiss watch. That is why Kamyshin publicly apologized after Biden’s trip caused delays on other routes.
A glance at the huge screen in the station where the train departures are shown is enough to see that the vast majority are green. Even those who go to towns as hard-hit as Kherson or Pokrovsk, on the Donbas front, leave and arrive when the schedule marks. “The Russians bomb daily. But, from day one, we’ve learned to fix the infrastructure quickly, and they haven’t stopped us at any point. We have not canceled a single long-distance passenger train, “explains Kamyshin, who is permanently connected to his team through an earpiece.
That success has not come cheap. “353 employees have been killed and 788 wounded in this year of war,” he reports gravely. There have also been fatalities among passengers, for example during the shelling of the Kramatorsk station. And that is what Kamyshin fears the most, because there is no way to protect the buildings from artillery fire. Of course, they use different methods, which cannot be explained for security reasons, so that the trains are not hit or suffer as little damage as possible. “I have personally gone everywhere we go to show that I don’t send workers where I wouldn’t travel,” he says.
Despite the difficult situation, which derailed the original modernization plans, Kamyshin continues to work to improve the railway infrastructure: “In the last year we have added 90 new trains to the fleet, the only thing that differentiates them from their age is European countries. It is the highest number in history. And we continue with construction plans, because surviving is not enough. There has been little investment in infrastructure, and war or no war, we have to grow and improve.”
The manager is also adding new routes and services to the European Union. “We need greater cooperation from the Polish railways to increase frequencies and destinations,” he adds in a more critical tone, because he underlines the need to increase capacity in the transport of goods and passengers to Poland, Romania and Moldova. «Cargo is the lifeblood of the economy, because Ukraine is a purely exporting country. And now it is doubly important, although the volume of merchandise has fallen by 50% since the invasion. Even so, we take grain to Spain, iron to Poland, and so on. And now we are growing and we are helping SMEs to reinvent their logistics chains », he analyzes.
The achievement of all these plans in the middle of an invasion is not easy. And you can tell that Kamyshin runs the company with a firm hand. “You can’t run a company this size by being soft and friendly. But people see that we are recovering the respect of the population. Before the war, employees had no prestige. Now people shake our hands and thank us,” says Kamyshin, who receives his orders directly from President Volodymir Zelensky. “The first thing she said to me was ‘go and make it work,'” he recalls. So far, he has succeeded.