After the interruption of the Saint-Petersburg-Helsinki link, the Moscow-Kaliningrad is the last Russian train to cross a country of the European Union, Lithuania. At Vilnius station, images of the war in Ukraine were displayed to warn Russian passengers.
This Sunday, the Allegro made its last stop before a while at Helsinki station. This high-speed train connecting the city to Saint Petersburg in three and a half hours has been interrupted sine die from this Monday by the Finnish national railway company, VR. With the cessation of air links between Russia and the countries of the European Union (EU), it was one of the last ways to leave the aggressor country of Ukraine to join the West. Since the beginning of the war, this train had been crowded with Russian passengers. Cross-border workers, mostly, as well as Russians residing elsewhere in Europe and forced to transit through Finland to return home from Russia. But also a few passengers who took a one-way trip to settle far from the country of Vladimir Putin.
If the Allegro was the last train to serve Europe from Russia, it is however not the last to cross it. There remains the one linking Moscow to the enclave of Kaliningrad, located on the shores of the Baltic Sea. The latter passes through Minsk, Belarus, before crossing Lithuania from east to west. In normal times, Russian travelers can even get off at Vilnius station. But since the start of the war, this train has only stopped in the Lithuanian capital to pick up or let out EU nationals.
During this stopover in European lands, the Russians on board can appreciate the original welcome reserved for them. “Dear passengers of the Moscow-Kaliningrad train. Today Putin is killing civilians in Ukraine. Do you approve of that?”repeats in Russian an announcer from the Vilnius station.
The testing of Russian passengers does not end there. To confront them with the reality of what is presented to them as a “special peacekeeping operation” and not a war by the Russian authorities, 24 photos of bombed districts of Kyiv and Mariupol have been installed near the windows, on the quay. On some of these photos, we can read the sentence repeated by the announcer, also transcribed in Russian.
Opposite effect to that expected
“We have selected images that reflect with emotion the dark reality that the Ukrainian people live”, explains Jonas Staselis, president of the Lithuanian Press Photographers Club, associated with the organization of this exhibition by the Lithuanian railway company. These pictures representing destroyed buildings, injured civilians, others in the middle of neighborhoods full of debris or bodies covered by bloody tarpaulins, were taken by two Ukrainian photographers: Evgeniy Maloletka and Maxim Dondyuk.
The latter was dedicated a portrait in the Time Magazine. He says that his photos were taken during the bombing of Kyiv on March 6, during which he was injured in the arm by shrapnel. The photographer also says he hopes that people who see his images “will not be able to forget them. A photo can change people, societies. Hopefully, my work can help stop this war.”he wants to believe.
If these photos have the merit of drawing attention to what is really happening in Ukraine, it is not certain that the message transmitted to travelers is the one expected. An image broadcast by the Lithuanian press even suggests that this exhibition would stir up tensions more than it would calm them. We actually see a passenger giving the photographer a middle finger…