The Train to Dnipro: Notes from the Edge of Civilisation

By Matthew Parish

Monday 26 October 2026

There comes a point in every badly planned journey when the traveller ceases attempting to improve his circumstances and begins instead to observe them anthropologically. I have reached that point before even boarding the train. I am standing in Lviv in the pouring icy rain, the air raid sirens are sounding, I am hungry already and ahead of me lies a fifteen-hour railway journey to Dnipro for which my preparations appear to have consisted principally of buying a ticket.

There is something wonderfully clarifying about this. Years of experience in Ukraine have taught me about missile trajectories, military bureaucracy, international aid organisations, regional politics and the elaborate procedures by which journalists obtain permission to visit places in which they may subsequently be killed. None of this knowledge has equipped me to answer the question currently occupying my mind: what am I going to eat?

I have some food, but it is simply not enough food. This distinction has assumed tremendous importance now that the train is approaching and every shop selling anything edible suddenly appears either closed, distant or surrounded by people better organised than I am. The journey is approximately fifteen hours, which is quite sufficient time for hunger to progress through several distinct philosophical stages: irritation, self-reproach and eventually contemplation of the nutritional properties of objects not ordinarily regarded as food. By approximately 3am I expect to be assessing whether the railway timetable itself contains sufficient cellulose to constitute dietary fibre.

Ukrainian Railways may, of course, rescue me, and it has accomplished more remarkable things during this war. Trains continue running through missile attacks, blackouts and damaged infrastructure, transporting soldiers, refugees, journalists, grandmothers, cats and quantities of luggage that would cause a British railway employee to declare a national emergency. There will presumably be tea, because Ukraine could be reduced to three railway stations and a field outside Poltava and there would still be tea. Somewhere a conductor would emerge from the darkness bearing boiling water in a glass held inside one of those magnificent metal holders that appear capable of surviving a direct nuclear strike.

Food is less certain. I am therefore preparing myself psychologically for the possibility that dinner will consist of tea accompanied by another cup of tea, followed by a light supper of tea. This is not quite the catering arrangement I would have selected for a fifteen-hour expedition, but wartime journalism has always required adaptability.

The weather is contributing magnificently to the atmosphere. Lviv is being drenched by freezing rain of the sort that does not merely make one wet but seems personally determined to enter every opening in one’s clothing. The pavements shine beneath the streetlights, the gutters overflow and the sky has acquired the colour of an old Soviet filing cabinet. Meanwhile the air raid sirens are sounding, lending the entire departure the quality of a state-organised warning that I should reconsider my plans.

This would ordinarily be the dramatic part of the story, yet Ukraine has a remarkable capacity to subordinate mortal danger to minor inconvenience. I am aware that the sirens may signify missiles or drones heading somewhere in western Ukraine, but at this particular moment I am considerably more preoccupied by the possibility that my socks are wet. Perhaps this represents psychological adaptation to war, or perhaps it represents idiocy. The distinction has become increasingly difficult to maintain.

My preparations for Dnipro itself are proceeding along similar lines. I have a schedule, although describing it as a schedule would be unfair to schedules, because it is more accurately a collection of aspirations associated with approximate times of day. Several NGOs have responded enthusiastically to my enquiries, assuring me that they would be delighted to meet me and that they are organising cultural events. They have also sent me links, none of which works.

There is something profoundly Ukrainian about being invited to a cultural event in a city regularly attacked by ballistic missiles only to discover that the principal obstacle to attending it is Facebook. Russian electronic warfare has apparently failed to achieve what Meta accomplishes effortlessly: making it impossible to discover where anything is happening. I click one link and encounter a blank page, while another informs me that the content is unavailable. A third appears to require membership of a group whose existence cannot itself be confirmed.

The NGOs nevertheless remain enthusiastic. Somewhere in Dnipro, culture is flourishing magnificently, although I simply have no means of discovering where. This creates the intriguing possibility that my cultural programme will consist principally of walking around Dnipro in the rain asking strangers whether they know where the inaccessible Facebook event is taking place.

My communications with the military have been even more successful. Various messages have arrived from people whose ranks and functions are not entirely clear to me, explaining that my documentation is inadequate. This is useful information, although its utility is somewhat diminished by the subsequent explanation that I have sent the documentation to the wrong email address. The recipient who should never have received my documents has nevertheless examined them sufficiently carefully to determine that they are defective, and one must admire the thoroughness.

I am tempted to reply asking whether defective documents sent to the correct email address would be preferable to correct documents sent to the wrong one. Experience suggests that this would generate a third email address and possibly another form. There must be somewhere in Ukraine an office responsible for journalists seeking military access, and I imagine a long corridor with grey doors, behind each of which sits an officer whose sole responsibility is explaining that the officer behind the next door is responsible. At the end of the corridor is a final door bearing a handwritten notice instructing visitors to return to the beginning.

Kafka would have recognised Ukraine immediately, although he too would have encountered administrative difficulties. He would have been informed that his accreditation request was incomplete because he had submitted The Trial rather than Form 7-Б. Upon returning with Form 7-Б, he would presumably have discovered that applications had recently migrated to an online portal unavailable outside Ukraine.

This is not criticism. Ukrainian military bureaucracy is fighting an existential war while simultaneously attempting to prevent every lunatic with a smartphone from wandering into restricted areas and photographing artillery positions. The bureaucracy therefore has reasons for being suspicious, complicated and occasionally incomprehensible. Unfortunately I am now one of the lunatics with a smartphone, although I like to imagine that I am a reasonably well-intentioned one.

My accommodation offers another source of reassurance. Before travelling, I consulted Tripadvisor, where one reviewer described my hotel as “1960s Soviet”. This may be the finest hotel review I have ever read because it conveys almost everything while specifying almost nothing. I immediately imagine a lobby approximately the size of an aircraft hangar, containing marble that is undoubtedly expensive but somehow nevertheless unattractive. There will be a chandelier designed by an electrical engineer who despised intimacy.

Behind the reception desk will sit a woman capable of determining my moral character before I have produced my passport. She will inspect my reservation, inspect me, inspect the reservation again and eventually hand me a key attached to a piece of wood sufficiently large to discourage theft. I shall understand immediately that she has been there since 1974 and that previous attempts to replace her have failed.

My room will contain furniture that cannot be moved because it was constructed in situ during the Khrushchev administration. The mattress will have survived seven Soviet premiers, Ukrainian independence, two revolutions and the full-scale Russian invasion, and it will regard me as temporary. There may also be a television approximately the dimensions of a microwave oven, possessing a remote control whose battery compartment is held shut with adhesive tape. One channel will work and the programme will concern agricultural machinery.

Yet I find the prospect strangely comforting. A hotel that has survived since the 1960s has already demonstrated considerable resilience, and if the Russians have failed to destroy it while Soviet interior design has failed to close it, I am unlikely to represent the decisive threat to its continued operation. It may even prove that “1960s Soviet” is precisely the architectural style one wants during a missile attack, since the walls were probably designed on the assumption that NATO bombers might arrive at any moment.

Then there is the matter of the IFAK, which I have forgotten. This discovery occurred sufficiently late that there was no longer anything useful to be done about it, allowing me to proceed directly to anxiety. The Individual First Aid Kit is one of those objects that seems unnecessary whenever one has it and absolutely indispensable the moment one does not. Had I packed mine, I would confidently expect never to open it, whereas because I have forgotten it I now assume that every Russian Iskander crew has somehow been informed.

I imagine somewhere east of here a Russian officer studying a map while an intelligence analyst enters the room carrying a red folder. The analyst leans towards him and whispers that Parish has forgotten the tourniquet. The officer looks slowly upwards, surveys the map of Dnipro and murmurs that at last the opportunity for which they have been waiting has arrived. Several colonels are summoned and the coordinates of my 1960s Soviet hotel are solemnly distributed.

This is irrational, because Dnipro is not the front line. It is a vast city containing hospitals, pharmacies, ambulances and presumably shops selling medical equipment. Hundreds of thousands of people inhabit it without carrying haemostatic gauze to breakfast, yet war produces peculiar habits of thought. Once you become accustomed to carrying certain things, their absence feels like a provocation to fate.

My luggage reflects an alternative set of priorities. I have packed several charging cables whose purposes I cannot identify, documents that nobody will want and clothes suitable for circumstances that are unlikely to arise. I do not have the medical equipment designed to stop me bleeding to death. The principles governing my luggage therefore appear broadly consistent with those governing the rest of the expedition.

And yet there are serious reasons why I am going. Journalism conducted from Lviv eventually becomes too comfortable, because Lviv is Ukraine but it is also a city where one can sit beneath Austro-Hungarian façades drinking excellent coffee while explaining the eastern war to people who are themselves drinking excellent coffee. There comes a moment when this arrangement begins to feel morally and professionally inadequate. The war is elsewhere, and periodically one has to travel towards it if one intends to continue writing about the country with any credibility.

The emails are not the country, nor are the press releases or NGO websites containing photographs of smiling volunteers distributing boxes. The country begins on the train, with the woman carrying three bags and a cat, the soldier sleeping in his uniform and the elderly man staring silently through the window at places invisible in the darkness. It is the conductor who has made this journey hundreds of times while missiles have fallen across the railway network, and it is the stations where people embrace for slightly too long because everyone understands that departures in wartime contain possibilities nobody wishes to articulate.

Somewhere beyond all this lies Dnipro. I wonder what it will look like in the rain, and I imagine the enormous river beneath a low grey sky, Soviet apartment blocks dissolving into mist, wet roads reflecting headlights and the industrial horizon stretching eastwards towards a war that becomes progressively less theoretical with every kilometre. Perhaps the rain will make the city beautiful, or perhaps it will merely make my shoes wet.

I may arrive exhausted and hungry. Nobody I have arranged to meet may actually meet me, while the cultural event may turn out to have occurred last Thursday in a building on the other side of the city. The military officer I eventually locate may explain that I require a document I have never heard of, whereupon I will produce another document and he will shake his head sympathetically before providing me with an email address. I will recognise it as the first email address, and at this point I may achieve enlightenment.

For now, however, enlightenment must wait because I have a train to catch. The rain continues to fall, the sirens continue to sound and my stomach has begun issuing warnings of greater immediate psychological force than the Ukrainian Air Force. I find myself wondering whether I will ever see civilisation again, although this is plainly ridiculous because Dnipro is a major European city, not an expedition into the Congo in 1887, and Ukrainian Railways is transporting me there in a heated sleeping carriage rather than by mule.

Nevertheless, civilisation is contextual. At this moment it means dry socks, a working hyperlink, valid military accreditation, an IFAK and something containing carbohydrates. I possess none of these things, but I do possess a railway ticket, a hotel reservation apparently transporting me directly into the Brezhnev era and a series of appointments of uncertain ontological status. That will have to suffice.

The train will travel east through the night while Lviv disappears behind me, the familiar world recedes and sometime tomorrow morning I shall step onto a platform in Dnipro and discover which parts of my itinerary exist outside my imagination. Until then, my priorities are straightforward: I must board the correct carriage, avoid losing my documents and investigate rumours that food exists somewhere aboard Ukrainian trains.

There is little point surviving Russian missiles, Ukrainian military bureaucracy and a 1960s Soviet hotel if one is ultimately defeated by the absence of a sandwich. On present evidence, however, the sandwich represents the most immediate and formidable adversary of the entire expedition.