Ukraine sees Russian effort to sow chaos as cyberattack hits rail service

By Yuliia Dysa and Tom Balmforth

KYIV (Reuters) -A powerful cyberattack knocked out the online ticketing system for Ukraine's state railway service, causing long queues at stations on Monday in what Kyiv officials said looked like a Russian attempt to "destabilise" the situation.

The rail system is a vital way for civilians and freight to travel round wartime Ukraine - a country twice the size of Italy - where air travel had been grounded due to regular missile and drone strikes since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022.

There was no comment from Moscow about the attack.

Blaming the cyberattack on the "enemy", shorthand usually used by Kyiv to mean Russia, officials said rail travel had not been affected but that work was still under way to restore the online ticketing system more than 24 hours after the hack.

An outage was first reported on Sunday when the rail company notified passengers about a failure in its IT system and told them to buy tickets on-site or on trains.

"The latest attack was very systemic, unusual and multi-level," rail company Ukrzaliznytsia wrote on the Telegram app.

Long lines had formed at Kyiv's central train station on Monday morning as people waited to buy tickets. Booking offices said tickets were only available for travel until Tuesday.

The Ukrainian rail company, which has grappled with Russian missile strikes at various points during the war, did not explicitly say who it thought was behind the attack.

A Ukrainian security official and a senior government source, both of whom were speaking on condition of anonymity, said the attack looked like it had been carried out by Russia.

The security official said the attack appeared aimed at exerting psychological pressure on Ukrainians and destabilising the social and political situation.

"It was some hacker group. We think that they are Russians. It is a strong strike but not critical," the government source said, also saying that it looked aimed at "destabilisation."

Trains have been the main mode of transportation for domestic and international passengers since 2022, as well as a key route for weapons and equipment deliveries.

The system transported around 20 million passengers and 148 million tonnes of freight last year, Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said at the end of 2024.

Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, Ukrzaliznytsia's board chairman, said on national television that the company had handled the fallout from the attack well.

"Operational traffic did not stop for a single moment. The enemy attack was aimed at stopping trains, but we quickly switched to backup systems."

(Reporting by Anastasiia Malenko, Yuliia Dysa; additional reporting Max Hunder and Sergiy Karazy; writing by Tom Balmforth; editing by Mark Heinrich)