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Rail Force One How a train took Biden secretly and safely to Kyiv
The Guardian
|February 25, 2023
Alexander Kamyshin, the head of Ukraine's state railway company, Ukrzaliznytsia, doesn't get much sleep at the best of times.
On Sunday night, as Joe Biden was being ferried into Ukraine in a 10-hour night journey from Poland - in a carriage now known as "Rail Force One", he got almost none.
Along with others involved in the secret operation to bring the US president to his meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Kamyshin watched the progress of the train from a command centre.
A handsome bearded man sporting a hipster-ish braid of hair that falls over the shaved sides of his head, Kamyshin is deliberately vague about many of the details.
But in the past year, his devoted team has brought in world leaders, VIPs and diplomatic missions almost daily as part of a programme called "Iron Diplomacy".
Security is everything, he told the Guardian in an interview at Kyiv’s main railway station. “We have not had one leak. There have been no photographs from train attendants. We respect the confidence of the delegations.
This story is from the February 25, 2023 edition of The Guardian.
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