Russia’s Armored Trains Are Back in Ukraine: Here's How Ukraine is Fighting Back

In Russia, the road is a rumor, the highway is an adventure, but the railway is sacred. When the army advances, the very first thing that follows is the railhead, complete with an armored train.

Courtesy AFU

If you had “armored trains” on your 2025 Ukraine war bingo card, congratulations, you’re either a reader of “Eyes Only”, a time traveler from the age of Rasputin, or just someone who knows that Russia has never met a Soviet military idea it didn’t want to drag out for one last world tour.

Yet here we are, scrolling past TikToks of hypersonic missiles and AI-powered drone swarms, only to see Moscow rolling steel-plated choo-choos across the steppe like it’s staging a remake of GoldenEye on a vodka budget.

Russian state media, never shy about giving us the world’s most pathetic military parades, has been parading the “Yenisey” like it’s the pride of their fleet: a fortress on rails packed with enough firepower to make any James Bond villain green with envy.

The Yenisey is a Franken-train’s monster of military nostalgia: anti-aircraft guns here, Utyos heavy machine guns there, and just for extra flavor, a full-on BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicle jammed onto a flatcar.

You half-expect the thing to sprout mustachioed conductors and a complimentary borscht service.

But don’t let the retro glam fool you. The Yenisey’s main job isn’t to impress the home audience (although it does), but to keep the wheels of Russian logistics rolling in the absolute worst conditions imaginable.

Russian doctrine, unlike that of most modern armies, still pivots on the iron law of railways. Indeed, there’s an old saying from the Cold War that says, “Where the Russian boot goes, the rails follow.” Western militaries may have traded trains for trucks, and trucks for drones, but the Kremlin is still betting on steel rails and Soviet legacy to keep its guns, butter, and troops moving forward.

To understand why, you have to appreciate the scale and weirdness of Russian geography. This is a country where a single supply convoy might have to traverse more miles than the entire French army did in two world wars combined, just to get from one warehouse to the next trench line.

In Russia, the road is a rumor, the highway is an adventure, but the railway is sacred. When the army advances, the very first thing that follows is the railhead, complete with an armored train, just in case Ukraine has other ideas.

And yes, these aren’t just for show. Armored trains like the Yenisey have a real role in Russian military operations: escorting logistics convoys, conducting reconnaissance and repair under fire, and, if all else fails, standing in as the world’s most overengineered Uber for stranded Russian infantry.

The Russians don’t just want their supply lines open; they want them bulletproof, bombproof, and (ideally) Telegram-worthy.

Meanwhile, Western military strategists, who last used armored trains in anger somewhere between Prohibition and the Great Depression, are left scratching their heads. Armored trains seem about as relevant as deploying knights on horseback, or training carrier pigeons to jam enemy Wi-Fi.

But Russia never got the memo. In Moscow’s calculus, armored trains make a weird kind of sense: they can’t be easily ambushed, they can shrug off small arms fire, and with a little creative engineering, they double as mobile fortresses. They’re part logistical sledgehammer, part moving bunker, and part propaganda sideshow, an irresistible combination for a regime obsessed with martial symbolism.

The curious case of the nuclear train

Actually, the US did do some weird shit with military trains once…

In 1983, US intelligence agencies discovered that the Soviet Union had deployed a rail-based nuclear missile system that could travel a distance of 622 miles per day, undetected, and launch missiles from any location along its route.

Known as the SS-24 Scalpel, the missile was only test fired once during an exercise in the Kostroma Region. The missile hit a target in Kamchatka and most troubling, American monitors were unable to fix the train’s coordinates either before or after the launch.