Warsaw/Kiev—The sun has already set by the time I arrive at the Warsaw East train station. It set hours ago, at 3:45 p.m., a brilliant burst of red that gave way abruptly to deep black. Every November day is like this in Eastern Europe. There are no lingering twilights. The day is divided from night as land is from sea.
I have been wandering Warsaw these last two days, waiting for an express train to Kiev. “Express” is the railway’s term of art: It actually takes a very long time—an overnight trip—to reach Ukraine’s capital city. But there is no way around it. Ever since Russian forces invaded in February 2022, the country’s airspace has been closed to commercial flight. Getting into and out of Ukraine is a bit of a trick. Some people load into vans and cross the border from other states in the former Eastern Bloc. Others ride their bikes or walk, though I am told not as often as in the early days of the war. Most take the train.
But even then there is no direct route from Poland, Romania, Slovakia, or Hungary. Ukraine’s network of tracks was originally laid by the Russian Empire, meaning that the majority of its rolling stock runs on broad-gauge railways, which are about three inches wider than the standard gauges that extend through most of Europe. The construction of the country’s modern infrastructure was a Soviet project, built with the strategic intent of walling off East from West. For this reason, borders, often an abstraction at best in the Schengen Area, are a hard truth at the Ukrainian line. Not only is the state politically and economically outside of the European Union, its railways are not even physically connected to its Western neighbors’. (The Ukrainian government ruled a recent proposal to switch to standard gauges “unrealistic.”) In fact, until the Ukrainian army bombed rail crossings to its invader’s territory, the country was still integrated into the Russian Federation. In a strictly geometric sense, Ukraine is a Russian satellite, not a European adjunct. This is one of the many inconvenient facts about the country that its leaders are struggling to address as they plead for admission into the American-led European community.
Whether Ukraine belongs in that community is a difficult question, and I’m not sure its war with Russia will provide a satisfying answer. But I can’t help posing it to myself, repeatedly, during the whole of my Warsaw stopover. After all, what does it mean to be European? Is it simply a geographic designation or is it something more, a set of manners and morals? Poland seems to give evidence in favor of the second proposition. It is the historic battleground of Europe, yes, but the Poles as a people have until rather recently been considered a little less-than by their continental compatriots. I have visited once before, more than a decade ago, and the country was palpably different than anything westward. Even a tourist could see that Poland was still transitioning from the comic corruption of its post-Soviet hangover to something resembling Brussels’s standards of respectability. By now the transformation is complete. Poland is like any other nation in the European Union, unmoored from its past and uncertain of its future: disoriented, dejected, demographically doomed.
As soon as I step off the metro at Warsaw’s Centrum station into the midafternoon night, I behold the Palace of Culture and Science, looming in all its gloomy Stalinist glory. It is considered an embarrassment by many, and it appears as if the city has tried to hide it with an overabundance of glass and steel skyscrapers, some of the tallest in Europe, whose pretensions to elegance define the city’s skyline. Outside the station, Poles of every class and profession stream by me, heads down, hands stuffed in their pockets. They look busy.
The Financial Times places Warsaw third on its list of “European Cities of the Future,” which, if you leave aside the unlovely architecture and unenviable climate, makes perfect sense. Like Berlin at the turn of this century, Warsaw has successfully reinvented itself. No longer a Soviet dump, still scarred by its disastrous role in the final months of the Second World War, these days Warsaw is an international city and a hub for Fortune 500 companies. It is also a cultural center, which is to say, a relatively cheap place for young people to get trashed and hook up.
On the street, the bohemians mix freely with the professionals. It is hard to tell them apart. As I wander through the Marszałkowska housing district, I gaze up at the old, imposing bas-reliefs of Poland’s workers. These socialist-realist titans of bricklaying, steelworking, and mothering look so proud, so certain. If their stone eyes could see, what would they think—the hardy men and stout-legged women of the Soviet imagination—about their great-grandchildren, dead-eyed girls and slope-shouldered boys scuttling below in ill-fitting jeans and chunky boots?
The night before the train leaves, a Greek in a lowlit speakeasy makes friendly and holds forth on the dire state of Europe. Although a young man in his early 30s, he speaks as one with authority—or at least in the tone of someone who reads the Economist. Europe’s future is vassalage, he says. Right now it is in service to the United States, but not for much longer. American global power is waning, he declares, in large part because it has lost its moral credibility through its continued assistance to Israel throughout the Gaza war. At the same time, he adds, China’s power is rising, because, unlike the United States, it offers its client states fair deals, free from moral posturing. Soon all of Europe will be under China’s benign dominion, just as it was a millennium ago. He does not look forward to this fate but is nonetheless resigned to it.
“And why are you in Warsaw tonight?”
“Well,” he explains, “I work in sales for a manufacturer of steel rebar. This week I am representing my firm at an international conference focused on rebuilding Ukraine’s critical infrastructure.”
“But isn’t it a little soon to be talking about rebuilding a country currently at war? It sounds highly theoretical.”
“Yes,” he smirks. “The funny thing is you have to make the peace before you can build the peace. We seem to have forgotten.”
The train that rolls into the Warsaw East station is of course not the one that will take me to Kiev, but only a Polish commuter shuttle. I am riding it as far as Chełm, a town a few miles from the Ukrainian border, best known outside of Poland for an eponymous collection of Jewish jokes. The train leaves Warsaw promptly at 5:49 p.m., just as the schedule said it would, and it is a model of Euro efficiency: comfortable, well-lit, air-conditioned. For three hours it zips across the country, stopping every half hour or so. An overbearingly polite voice periodically speaks in English on the loudspeaker to “invite” me to buy snacks and drinks from the vending machine in the diner car. I try to ignore it and look out the window at the city tapering into exurban sprawl, which soon drops off into fields and outer darkness. Occasionally freight trains pulling gas tanks scream by in the other direction.
As if embarrassed, the shuttle departs as soon as it unloads us. The Ukrainian train, with its massive blue sleeper cars, is already waiting on the opposite platform. But it is not scheduled to leave until 11:00 p.m. That gives me about two hours of dead time in a town where the two open businesses are a chain grocery store and Żabka, Poland’s approximation of 7/11. So, like everyone else, I mob the grocery store to stock up on drinks, peanuts, chips—anything to push me through the overnight journey. There is nowhere to sit inside, so we end up eating our improvised dinners and drinking our liters of beer in the parking lot, and, as departure time draws nearer, on the platform itself. With each bite, we inhale the idling train’s diesel exhaust.
Nabokov writes in his memoir that, when he was five, he felt that changing trains on the German border was an act imbued with strange and exciting meaning. Only later, when it was impossible for him to return to Russia, did he realize this was the feeling of homecoming. Even in his old age, he thought fondly of the changing of the gauge, for it was “a rehearsal—not of the grand homecoming that will never take place, but of its constant dream.” Somehow I doubt any of the 200-odd Ukrainians boarding the sleeper train tonight harbor such gauzy thoughts about their time spent in this little border town. As I step up into the car, I turn around for one last look at the platform. Its lone trashcan is overflowing with beer bottles, soda cans, cigarette butts.
Inside the carriage, I am greeted with the physical remains of Ukraine’s Soviet era. The state-owned railway has some newer trains, but this is not one of them. It likely dates from the mid-’80s, or at least from before the time when functional ventilation became an expectation rather than a luxury. My cabin, which I share with three Ukrainian women, is stiflingly hot. The massive vent on the ceiling blows down a constant stream of warm air, magnifying the stench of our body odor and bad breath. The only way to dispel it is by opening a fogged-up window. But it is bitter cold outside, and the window snaps shut without warning. We leave it alone and decide to sweat in silence.
As my traveling companions load their bags, I survey the rest of our cabin. It is a tight space. Only one person at a time can stand on the floor between the four bunks riveted to the walls. And the walls themselves are sheet metal, so thin that you can hear everything happening in the cabins on the opposite sides. They are outfitted with mysterious metal bars and broken coat hooks, completely useless and likely never to be repaired. Obviously there are no electrical outlets or phone charging stations. I find that all four of us have been issued wash towels and bedsheets in disposable bags. These are grimy and faded and threadbare from constant reuse. I leave mine alone and make peace with the fact that I shall be sleeping beneath my coat.
And yet for many of these passengers, this train and others like it are freighted with certain feelings of nostalgia. (Some of Ukraine’s active rolling stock dates to Brezhnev’s premiership.) These are the cars that carried millions of Ukrainians all over the Soviet Union before the Eastern Bloc broke up. In the old days, they had dining rooms with big samovars, bubbling and ready to serve passengers a cup of tea. All of that is gone now. You can still ask the conductor to make you a glass of Lipton in his cabin—and many do—but that’s hardly the stuff of romance.
Once the train pulls out of Chełm, two of the women in my cabin, both elderly, drift off in their bunks. The third works on her laptop. Eventually we fall into conversation. Viktoriia is a 37-year-old aid worker returning to Kiev from a conference in Denmark. She travels out of the country frequently and feels rather guilty about her absences. The guilt is not just a yearning for her homeland—though she is intensely nationalistic—but a longing to be with her husband and 5-year-old son. When the war first broke out, she fled with her son to Bavaria for two years while her husband, prevented by law from leaving Ukraine, remained behind. Now they are all back together in a suburb of Kiev, but she does not know how much longer they all can endure the strain of the rolling blackouts and nightly drone attacks.
She begins to describe her home life, but is interrupted by a rapping at the cabin door. It is the Polish border guards. They take our passports, and, after a perfunctory once-over, wave us out of the European Union.
As we cross the Bug River in Ukraine, I ask Viktoriia to tell me more about home. She sighs. Like many younger, westernizing Ukrainians of her class, she faces the future with trepidation. She was 16 during the Orange Revolution of 2004—“We were very optimistic then, too optimistic”—and for her whole adult life she has been looking forward to a European Ukraine. Her hopes have largely been frustrated, sometimes in weirdly personal ways. When she and her husband married about a decade ago, they planned to honeymoon in Italy. Their visas were denied, and they settled for Georgia instead. The wine there was good, but the rejection still stung.
Her story is interrupted again by another rapping. This time it is the Ukrainian border guards. They collect our passports and add them to a stack as thick as the complete Dickens. Then they move on down the car. It is almost an hour before they return.
As we wait, Viktoriia tells me about her son. Almost his whole life he has known nothing but war. When she looks into his eyes, she sees worry, uncertainty. And at night she fears his death. She knows there is little she can do to save him. Kiev is under near-constant attack from drones and ballistic missiles. Out in the suburbs, getting to a bomb shelter is often more trouble than it is worth, especially during the coldest months of winter. The nearest one to Viktoriia’s apartment is a ten-minute drive. If a missile is headed in her direction, by the time she hears the alert, it is too late.
These days, during the air raids, she sleeps in her son’s room, hoping that if the worst occurs, her body might protect his. Although, she confesses, she has grown so used to the nighttime noises that she hardly notices them herself.
“I can hear my son very softly saying ‘mom, mom’ from the other room, but sometimes I sleep through explosions and air raid signals,” she says. Then she laughs: “Maybe I don’t have the mothering instinct. Or maybe I’m just exhausted.”
The Ukrainian guards return with our passports. All clear. It is time to sleep. Viktoriia pulls up her sheets, and I pull my coat over my shoulders. But she has one more thing to tell me.
“Without a security guarantee, I will seriously think about leaving Ukraine,” she says. “I cannot raise my son like this.”
“The choice is that stark?” I ask.
“My grandparents grew up surrounded by death,” she says. “They were literally surrounded by it.” She then describes their suffering through the Holodomor and the Second World War. Her own parents, she adds, suffered through the Soviet malaise of the ’70s. She herself suffered through the post-Soviet instability of the ’90s. She does not want her son to suffer through a geographic tug-of-war that ends with a Russia-dominated Ukraine. Even if the two countries reach a settlement, however imperfect, she will still suffer. War has marked her, and there is no escape.
“Everything is unreal,” she says. “It is everywhere. I’m scrolling on Instagram: I see a puppy, and I’m happy. But then just below I see awful news—a terrible video, a drone attack—I’m in tears. Death for us is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.”
The train jolts. One of the older women, awoken, sits up in her bunk and asks if I, an American, am afraid of visiting a city so frequently under air attack. She mentions that just the night before more than 400 Shahed drones swarmed Kiev, killed seven people, and injured many more.
“I have no idea what I feel,” I reply. “I’m already on this train. I don’t think I can get off.”
The night passes fitfully. The train stops and starts many times without warning. Each time this happens, our cabin’s sliding door rolls open, letting in the exterior corridor’s harsh fluorescence. I have been told that the Russians don’t tend to target moving trains. The tracks, however, are easier to hit. When this happens, the Ukrainians stop all rail traffic and send out a crew to repair the line as soon as possible. They have to. The railways are the country’s lifeline to the West, even if they don’t fit together exactly.
I have a hard time sleeping, so I step out into the hall. It reeks of overheated bodies. Even the metal handrails running along the windows are sweaty. And the bathroom is no better. As I approach the door, the foul stink of human excrement fills my nostrils. I am reminded, insensibly, of one of the more insane exchanges in The Idiot, when one of Dostoevsky’s many drunkards attempts to convince Prince Myshkin that the modern railways of Europe are Wormwood, that evil star in Revelation, which falls to the earth and poisons a third of the rivers, “and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.” Such are the trains, the drunkard explains, bringing with them modern barbarities wherever they travel. I look down into the metal toilet, which, try as I might, will not flush, and retch in agreement.
The next morning I awake in a daze. By the time most of my fellow passengers get out of their bunks, we are only an hour from Kiev. The little towns speed by us, dilapidated and torn up. It is hard to tell whether the decay is the result of war or privation or both. Many buildings are missing walls, roofs are caved in, and the structures near the tracks are covered in graffiti. In some towns feral dogs lounge in the streets. Nearer to the city, we pass Bucha, a suburb that was famously occupied during the first weeks of the war, when the Russian army surged in from the north and besieged Kiev. It was once a wealthy enclave, but now it looks battered, beaten up. The golden dome of its Orthodox church is dull in the hazy morning light.
As we enter the city itself, my fellow passengers begin gossiping about Zelensky. Ukraine’s president is facing the biggest corruption scandal of his career. In the following weeks, he will fire his chief of staff, but not before undermining his own national legitimacy and losing the remainder of his international sympathy. Meanwhile, Russian and American negotiators will together outline a peace plan that involves a reduction in force for Ukraine’s army, the forfeit of some of its disputed territories, and the country’s formal exclusion from NATO. There will be much plotting, backstabbing, revising, ass-kissing—but in the end little will change. The war will go on as before. And Ukraine, always a borderland between Europe and Russia, will remain central to the continent’s intractable problems, a source of frustration for both East and West.
By the time the train reaches central Kiev, we may as well be in another world entirely. Bombed-out high rises, abandoned warehouses, and torched cars sit alongside new constructions and glittering fast-food joints. Some of the apartment buildings, still inhabited, are missing windows. These are covered over with plywood and insulation blankets. Everywhere there are generators running, desperate attempts to maintain normalcy. The whole city feels seasick. And, as the train pulls into the station, I feel queasy. We deboard, and we are not setting foot on dry land. We are stepping out into deep water.
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