Moscow raises the tension: drone hits civilian train, threat of naval seizures

A jet-powered Shahed drone struck the locomotive of a passenger train in Ukraine’s Odessa region on August 13, killing the driver and his assistant. The attack forced the evacuation of 340 passengers, including 67 children, in the Berezivka district, according to United24 Media, citing Ukraine’s state railway company Ukrzaliznytsia. No injuries were reported among the passengers, who were evacuated and brought to Odessa, as also confirmed by Sky TG24.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky commented on the attack, stressing the civilian nature of the target: “whoever was piloting the drone could not have failed to know that the target was entirely civilian.” Zelensky took the opportunity to renew a request already made to Washington: to hand over to Ukraine 10 percent of the United States’ Patriot systems, needed to intercept Russian ballistic missiles.

In the same hours, a second front of tension opened on the maritime and economic front. Vladimir Putin threatened to seize ships belonging to European countries, in response to the Union’s plans to sell the cargo of seized tankers from the so-called Russian “shadow fleet,” the network of vessels used by Moscow to circumvent oil sanctions. The threat, reported by Euronews and OilPrice.com, comes after new sanctions approved last month granted EU member states the power to sell the oil or any other cargo seized from sanctioned vessels.

The European Union’s twenty-first sanctions package, adopted on July 23, added another 41 vessels to the blacklist, bringing the overall number of shadow fleet ships subject to restrictions to 673. Against this backdrop, Sweden announced its intention to transfer to Kyiv a seized Russian vessel, suspected of carrying grain from occupied Ukraine: a move that anticipates precisely the kind of use of seized cargo Moscow says it wants to respond to.

The two episodes, distant in geography and in nature — an air attack on railway infrastructure, a threat of commercial and naval retaliation — arrived within the same window of hours and outline a front that is widening beyond the ground battlefield. On one side, Ukraine counts two civilian victims among railway staff and is calling for additional air defense systems; on the other, the European Union sees its own sanctions weapon — the sale of seized cargo — turned back by Moscow as possible ground for direct retaliation against the commercial fleets of member states.

It remains to be seen whether Putin’s threat will be followed by actual seizures of European ships: for now it is a statement, not an action already carried out. Sweden, for its part, has already announced a concrete step in the opposite direction, transferring the seized Russian vessel to Kyiv.