On the train from Kyiv, Ukraine, to Chelm, Poland, September 16, 2026/Author

By Susan Bonner

September 16, 2026

KYIV — I’ve been here this week working on an international project committed to making Ukraine’s past more accessible to a global audience.

Ukraine’s present greeted me at the border.

The Russian drone that smashed into the passenger train approaching Poland from Kyiv on Sunday morning hit just two kilometres down the track from the train I was riding from Poland to Kyiv.

The train that was hit — there was one strike on its locomotive and one on a nearby gas station — was just next to one carrying former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, former Swedish prime Minister Carl Bildt and other European officials returning from a security conference in Kyiv. Former CIA Director David Petraeus was on another VIP train nearby.

No one was hurt. But the Russian drone carried a message: Neither Ukraine’s security allies in NATO, nor its visiting political allies, are safe from Vladimir Putin’s campaign of unlawful aggression.

I am travelling as a senior fellow of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy with scholars from Europe and North America — including historians, archaeologists, and at least one philosopher— headed to Kyiv to workshop their papers for the Ukrainian History Global Initiative.

Its goal: to publish a comprehensive history of Ukraine, from prehistory to the modern state. I’m a recently transitioned career journalist, neither an academic nor a Ukraine expert beyond the research I’d done to anchor CBC Radio’s Your World Tonight. I’m here to provide whatever help I can to make the work accessible for a general audience. But first, we had to get to Kyiv.

Over the last four and a half years, countless world leaders and dignitaries have visited Kyiv by way of the 570-km train ride from Poland, on the route dubbed the “Peace Express”. What began as a practical work-around of unsafe airspace has become a symbolic political pilgrimage.

Showing up demonstrates support and the travel was relatively safe, secured by Ukrainian air defence and Russia’s reluctance to target such internationally symbolic civilian infrastructure.

Both of those dynamics are changing.

Russia has ramped-up its drone campaign and Ukraine’s ability to intercept is limited, including by Donald Trump’s refusal to provide interceptors, citing U.S. stockpiles diminished by his own war against Iran.

Gas stations, warehouses, and now trains far from the front lines have been targeted.

Russia’s war creeps ever closer to border states.

Poland immediately condemned this week’s attack and vowed to increase border security to defend against further threats.

On Tuesday, Lithuanian officials reported that NATO shot down a Russian drone in their airspace.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed to CBS News that his plane was targeted twice by Russian drones in Moldova, where he stopped on his way to, and back from, Norway. He also said he was sure Sunday’s drone strike had deliberately targeted the passenger train.

The previous night, as I boarded our train in Chelm, on the Polish side of the border, I was lamenting that I wouldn’t get to see the Ukrainian countryside I’d been reading so much about because we were travelling in darkness.

As it turned out, we did not travel overnight. We sat on the train, at the border, for 11 hours. At the time, we were not told why. We later learned that rail authorities had intelligence there would be attacks.

A rich history still lives behind the fortitude, fortune, and misfortune that inspired the extraordinary response of the Ukrainian people to Russia’s 2022 invasion.

On the train, we were warned about new security rules for rail travellers. We needed to be ready to evacuate the train whenever incoming drones were detected.

When our train finally moved across the Polish border, we stopped again in the heavily fortified no-man’s-land between Ukraine and Poland, marking the external European Union and NATO frontiers. News was then breaking about the two hits.

Within minutes, we rolled by the charred cars. It was quite an introduction to wartime Ukraine, as was our evacuation from our own train and our wait for the all-clear in the basement of the train station in Kovel.

Global attention on the war in Ukraine has waxed and waned over the last four years and seven months. In a convulsing world, it is hard to keep up.

But Ukraine has been at the centre of global history for centuries. Reminding — or informing — the world of how and why is what this project is about.

Europe’s great empires and ideologies have clashed over this land, and occasionally cooperated.

So, too, the world’s major faiths. In medieval history and earlier, the mix and movement of people, powers, and cultures through Ukraine as a major global trading route left their mark.

Modern Ukraine, independent only since 1991 — that status recognized first by Canada — holds all of that as it confronts this current conflict.

The experts on my train, and those gathering in Kyiv, know all the details and are eager to share.

They also know, and have just experienced, the risks of gathering in a country under fire.

And yet, when we arrive in Kyiv, there are few signs of this war. The city is a cosmopolitan metropolis. Yes, there is a curfew, but in the hours before midnight the streets bustle, even as an increasing number of siren alerts send people dashing to underground shelters several times a day or night. Or not.

My first night in Kyiv, exhausted from the sleepless, stressful train trip, I am given a lovely room. It is — two days after the 25th anniversary — room 911.  I decide to bunk down in the shelter in the basement of the hotel.

By night three, I’ve adjusted to the when-in-Kyiv vibe and join a walk through the city. My phone buzzes with an air alert. There are different levels: yellow for drones, red for missiles. This one is red. I ask why no one around us is scurrying underground.

“It is red, but not the bad red”, I am told by the Ukrainian archaeologist leading the tour.

Kyivans have learned to study the maps and apps that show them what is in the air and how far away. That helps them assess the relative danger from incoming attacks.

It’s one small part of Ukrainian resilience and the resolve to defy intimidation, showcased alongside the poignant tributes to the war’s fallen soldiers in the city’s iconic Maidan square. A flag for every one of them, just blocks from Kyiv’s old city and ancient ruins.

A rich history still lives behind the fortitude, fortune, and misfortune that inspired the extraordinary response of the Ukrainian people to Russia’s 2022 invasion.

Renowned American author and historian Timothy Snyder, now notably a professor at the Munk School having transferred from Yale, heads this history project. He opened the Kyiv conference with a reminder that the work is broader than one country’s story.

“It is a comprehensive history of Ukraine by way of the world and a comprehensive history of the world by way of Ukraine.”

The project’s purview focuses primarily on that history pre-2022.

Meanwhile, the post-2022 history is still being written on the front lines of this war, in individual lives, families, communities, cities across Ukraine and in global capitals, where leaders were reminded once again this week that what happens in Ukraine never stays in Ukraine.

Susan Bonner is a Senior Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She worked as a reporter and news anchor for CBC News for four decades.