Ex-CIA boss was steps away when Russian drone hit Ukrainian train

Retired Gen. David Petraeus said the Russian drone that struck a train near Ukraine’s border with Poland on September 13 was a jet-powered version of Russia’s Geran/Shahed attack drone, adding a detail Ukrainian officials had not specified in their own statements on the strike.

Petraeus, a former CIA director and retired four-star U.S. Army general, was aboard a separate train at Yahodyn station, about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the Polish border, when the drone hit the locomotive of a nearby Kyiv-Warsaw passenger train early Sunday. Ukraine’s state rail operator, Ukrzaliznytsia, confirmed his presence at the station and said there were no reports of casualties. A diplomatic train carrying former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt and security advisers from several European Union states had left the same station minutes earlier and had already crossed into Poland by the time of the strike.

“A Geran jet-powered drone hit the engine of the train on the track,” Petraeus wrote in a comment to The Defence Blog’s editor-in-chief on LinkedIn. He added that his own train had already passed through Ukrainian customs and was next to the one that was hit, close to the Polish border.

Ukrainian officials had said only that the strike involved a drone and that it was “quite likely” the diplomatic train, not the stationary locomotive, was the intended target. Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces were targeting rail infrastructure in western Ukraine used to move military supplies, without addressing the specific drone type. Petraeus’s account is the first to specify that the drone involved was a jet-powered Geran variant rather than the piston-engine Geran-2, also known as the Shahed-136, that makes up the bulk of Russia’s long-range drone fleet.

Ukraine’s Air Force had said the broader overnight barrage that day, in which Russia launched 863 drones nationwide, included a newer jet-powered drone alongside standard Geran-2s, Gerbera decoys and S8000 Banderol missile-carrying drones. Jet propulsion gives a drone higher speed than the piston-engine Geran-2, making it harder for air defenses to intercept.

Petraeus has traveled to Ukraine repeatedly since Russia’s 2022 invasion in an advisory capacity. He now serves as a partner at the investment firm KKR and chairs its Global Institute. Neither Ukrainian officials nor Russia’s Defense Ministry has confirmed the specific drone type Petraeus described.

The strike came as poor weather grounded much of western Ukraine in low cloud that day and coincided with the departure of multiple foreign delegations from Kyiv following a security conference there. Analysts, including French open-source researcher Clément Molin, have said the cloud cover made it harder for Ukrainian air-defense crews to visually track incoming drones.