Ukraine Lays Its Tracks to Europe

But the wartime story of Ukraine’s railways isn’t just one of survival, it’s also one of expansion. As Russia constructs its own lines to newly occupied Ukrainian territories, Ukraine is taking matters into its own hands. With the help of hundreds of millions of euros from international institutions—including a 200-million-euro loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development last year—Ukraine is building and restoring freight and passenger lines, creating the infrastructure to deepen its ties to Europe in ways that may outlast Russia’s invasion.

But there is one major problem: Ukraine’s rail infrastructure is a legacy of a time when the region’s political and economic center of gravity lay in Moscow. The country’s railway gauge, which differentiates the width of the tracks in many post-Soviet states from those in the rest of Europe, means that cross-border transit takes longer than usual. The last few years have made clear that Ukraine’s old orientation toward Russia is no longer viable. If its European aspirations hinge on its ability to connect itself with its neighbors to the west, then the railway gauge difference will be a significant obstacle to this future.

Ukrzaliznytsia officials told Foreign Policy that the number of passengers who traveled annually on their international routes skyrocketed from 40,000 in 2021 to 2.1 million in 2023, not including passengers who traveled on special evacuation trains. This growth “doesn’t happen by itself,” head of Ukrzaliznytsia Yevhen Lyashchenko said at a press conference in Kyiv. “Serious work was carried out.”

Although less visible to the average passenger, Ukrzaliznytsia’s European cargo expansion has been central to the country’s broader railway ambitions. According to Ukrzaliznytsia figures, in 2023 rail transport made up 62 percent of the country’s total cargo traffic. “Ukrzaliznytsia is mostly a freight company; transporting passengers is more of a social function,” said Serhiy Leshchenko, a former journalist and member of Ukrzaliznytsia’s supervisory board, in an interview in Kyiv.

This infrastructure has proved critical now that safe use of the country’s skies and seas is no longer guaranteed. Take, for example, Ukraine’s massive grain sector. Prior to the war, some 90 percent of Ukrainian grain was exported from ports on the Black Sea. But with part of the coast under occupation or frequent attack, exporters needed an alternative route. In 2022, Ukraine started building a series of dry ports—large hubs where cargo is loaded between trains and trucks—to help.

In August 2022, Ukraine and Moldova also reopened a 22-kilometer stretch of railway in the town of Basarabeasca that had gone unused for 23 years, allowing Ukrainian grain to pass through Moldova and be exported from ports in Romania. This meant that in July 2023, when Russia refused to renew a grain deal that allowed Ukrainian exports through the Black Sea, Kyiv had safer export routes to fall back on. The small stretch of railway “saved us,” as Oleksandr Kubrakov, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for restoration and minister of infrastructure until May, put it.

Piles of corn believed to have been exported from Ukraine lie on the ground next to train cars after eight wagons had their contents dumped on a railway track in Kotomierz, Poland, on Feb. 25.Mateusz Slodkowski/AFP/Getty Images

Ukraine’s work in this area is far from over. Big plans are already underway to further expand the country’s railways, not only refurbishing old cross-border lines and transport facilities on its borders but also constructing new ones. But these ambitions are complicated by the infrastructure Ukraine inherited. Many locomotives and wagons still in use were built elsewhere in the former Soviet Union; those made in Ukraine were built to run on post-Soviet rails. Most important, however, is the railway gauge, or the width between rails. Gauge sizes are not standardized worldwide. Ukraine uses the 1,520 mm railway gauge, but with the exception of Moldova, its western neighbors use the narrower 1,435 mm European gauge.

This means that a train running from, say, Warsaw to Kyiv must adjust the width of the axle between its wheels as it crosses the border. This can add several hours onto any rail journey depending on the context, which limits the number of trains able to use cross-border routes.

There are several ways that Ukraine could go about converting its tracks to the European gauge. Ukrainian officials have signed a memorandum on the use of Spanish technology that, by allowing the train’s wheels to slide along their axis as the track narrows or widens, makes it possible to switch between two gauges without stopping. Ukraine could also convert its tracks to dual-gauge lines, allowing trains of different gauges to use the same tracks. Another option would be to lay standard and wide-gauge tracks alongside each other, which already exists at one cargo facility near the Romanian border. Seven tracks converge here: three wide gauge, three European gauge, and one track with four rails, on which all trains can run.

Kubrakov told Foreign Policy that because there are thousands of kilometers of wide-gauge railways across Ukraine, replacing them all would be unrealistic and financially impractical. A July 2023 feasibility study commissioned by the European Commission and the European Investment Bank estimated that modernizing just 1 kilometer of Ukraine’s railways on flat terrain would cost around 1 million euros, and converting double tracks to European gauge could cost up to eight times that amount.

Railway officials told Foreign Policy that there are 308 kilometers of European-gauge tracks across Ukraine, but only 155 kilometers are currently used, concentrated on the western border. The current plan is to extend these tracks on key routes to connect a handful of cities in western Ukraine, then improve the capacity of these cities’ domestic connections within existing railway lines.

Any project to change gauge, Lyashchenko said, will have to be piecemeal. In April, officials announced the construction of 22 kilometers of European-gauge railway. A more ambitious plan, to which the U.S. Agency for International Development will contribute $225 million, is to build 75 kilometers of European-gauge track from a planned station outside Lviv to the Polish border at Mostyska, where a new dry port is located. Last October, Ukrzaliznytsia also reopened a border crossing at Rava-Ruska with a small section of European-gauge track and launched a direct train from Lviv to Warsaw for the first time in 18 years.

The longer-term ambition is to make Lviv into a European transport hub, with European-gauge intercity railways connecting it to Uzhhorod and Chernivtsi. Oleh Vasilyev, who runs Iron Highways, a popular YouTube channel about Ukraine’s railways, said that if the European-gauge railway crosses the Carpathian Mountains and reaches Lviv, “there will be a big effect” because the city is central to so many of the country’s transport routes. But this is “a project of decades, not years,” Vasilyev said.

Passengers transfer from an Ukrzaliznytsia train to a Polish SKPL transport company train on the maiden trip along the international route connecting Lviv and Warsaw on Oct. 15, 2023. Ukrinform/Getty Images/NurPhoto

The strategic importance of Ukraine switching to European gauge is obvious. After all, delays at the border don’t just affect passengers or commercial exports. “In the case of war, the same gauge greatly improves the efficiency of weapons deliveries,” said Konrad Poplawski of OSW, a Warsaw-based think tank.

To Poplawski, the decadeslong and still ongoing efforts of the Baltic states to link their railways with Europe demonstrates that the massive short-term investment is worth the long-term strategic benefits. They, too, inherited Soviet gauges, and since the fall of the Soviet Union, they have sought to integrate their transit networks with the rest of Europe as part of the Rail Baltica project. Potentially the largest Baltic infrastructure project in a generation, it has been mired by delays, and full integration won’t be possible for years to come. Because they were still dependent on Russian gauges, the shock of decoupling after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was especially steep. “Trying to sit on the fence in the case of transport infrastructure doesn’t pay off,” Poplawski said. “The Baltic states were slow to realize this and maintained their dependence on the Russian market for much longer.”

A switch to the European gauge may symbolize broader hopes, but experts in Kyiv say it is a distraction from more pressing issues. For Serhiy Vovk, director of the Kyiv-based Center for Transport Strategies, there is no point in discussing European-gauge railways in Ukraine without talking about the speed of transport, which will increase capacity for both freight and passenger services. That means completing electrification, which the country has already achieved in one crucial freight-only line to Poland since the Russian invasion. New routes and ambitions also require updating Ukraine’s diesel locomotive fleet, the vast majority of which is reportedly more than 25 years old. “In the case of the Warsaw-to-Kyiv route, demand exceeds our supply. The wagons are old and of a limited number; we could replace them, but it’s serious money,” noted Kubrakov.

Ultimately, the goal of Ukraine’s commercial and passenger railway expansion is not to replace other transport modes but to diversify them. Ukrzaliznytsia hopes this will pay financial dividends in the long run. Yet given Ukraine’s precarious geopolitical state, this diversification is also tied up in a sense of survival—as Vovk put it: “In the case that, God forbid, something else happens … we can quickly reorient.”

Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo steps off a train arriving at the railway station in Kyiv on Feb. 24. Benoit Doppagne/Getty Images/Belga Mag/AFP

Ukrzaliznytsia has already registered its own subsidiary in Poland to enter the freight market on EU railways. As it becomes cheaper for Ukraine to export many of its harvests through Europe, some European operators may be afraid of a new competitor entering the European market that does not yet play by the same rules. For instance, the rerouting of large-scale Ukrainian grain exports by land has been so successful that it inflamed tensions with Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary. Agricultural lobbies feared that prices would be undercut by the influx of Ukrainian grain, despite Ukrainian assurances that it would only travel through neighboring countries and not be sold in their markets.

Poplawski said that EU states in central Europe are cautiously optimistic about Ukraine’s attempts to reorient its transport networks to the west, but with major caveats. “Accession to the single market cannot be introduced without serious adjustments on the Ukrainian side to maintain a level playing field. The first stage when the Ukrainian economy had to be rescued from collapse is over, and some temporary schemes should be reassessed,” he argued. “The goal of the EU should be to make Ukrainian grain more competitive toward Russian grain on third markets.”

Many of the foreign friends that have assisted Ukrzaliznytsia’s expansion are also pushing for liberalization and de-monopolization reforms that could weaken its leading role in Ukrainian rail transport. Under its association agreement with the EU, Ukraine must pass a law on rail transport that includes certain norms for a competitive railway market, but it has made little progress toward this goal.

A child walks past a train door as refugees from Ukraine arrive at the railway station in the Hungarian-Ukrainian border town of Zahony on March 1, 2022, early in the war.Attila Kisbenedek/Getty Images/AFP

The proposed “unbundling” of Ukrzaliznytsia, a joint-stock company in which the Ukrainian state is the sole shareholder, would split the company up into entities handling passenger services and freight. Lyashchenko told Foreign Policy that “different understandings” of this concept existed even within EU institutions, yet the contours of the proposal are clear enough to worry Ukrainian officials and analysts.

“The European model is built to externally finance unprofitable sectors. Here in Ukraine, we subsidize unprofitable passenger transportation with cargo transport. Many don’t like it. But the company is stable in Ukraine,” Lyashchenko explained.

For Ukraine’s railway enthusiasts and transport planners, the switch to the European gauge isn’t just about connecting Ukraine to Europe but also maximizing Ukraine’s transit potential more broadly. While Russia’s invasion has severed Ukraine’s railway links toward Asia, it does not make them impossible, Vovk said. These trains can still link to Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea, allowing for trade with the Caucasus, Turkey, and the rest of the world beyond Russia’s reach.

“Europe has an interest in the growth of Ukraine’s economy,” Vovk said. The more effectively goods can enter and leave Ukraine, the more attractive the country will be as a place to do business, and thus the less macroeconomic support it will need from the EU. The immediate expense of threading Ukraine’s railway network into Europe’s is steep, but Ukrainian policymakers believe that such an investment may be one of the best chances to set up the country to stand on its own two feet.

This publication has been produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The contents of this publication are the sole responsibility of the authors and can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the European Union.