and Rotterdam) that would have to take over the shipping role of the blocked Black Sea ports. There are also proposed to build more 1,520 mm gauge railway lines in Poland and Germany, eventually as far to the Netherlands. Some railway stations have also been damaged due to the present war. Restoration and modernisation By October 2022, large-scale operations were underway to repair all damaged railway infrastructure with great precision, while mines were cleared and unexploded ordnance were defused or safely detonated and removed. The railways had proven to serve an essential role for Ukrainian military, cilivian and humanitarian logistics, and the recapture of Russian-occupied train tracks seriously disrupted the logistics of invading forces. Ukrainian Railways was also in the process of planning the replacement of its 1,520 mm gauge with the 1,435 mm standard-gauge railway for future integration with the European Union's rail network. In early February 2022 (just before the Russian invasion began), upon returning from a visit to Poland, Infrastructure Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov, his deputy Mustafa Nayyem and Ukrzaliznytsia CEO Oleksandr Kamyshin announced that Ukraine and Poland had agreed that a high-speed rail link would be built between Kyiv and Warsaw through , reducing travel times by four hours. Ukrzaliznytsia also decided to remove all restrictions on rail transit to Poland beginning on 10 February 2022. After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine caused a lot of damage to Ukrainian railway and airport infrastructure, the Polish government in October 2022 offered to Ukraine help post-war reconstruction, as well as adding an extra high-speed rail link between Lublin and Lviv through Zamość and Bełżec. In October 2022 the border crossing from Rakhiv south to Valea Vișeului railway station in Romania (closed in 2011) was reopened. Infrastructure Railways in Ukraine use various gauge types. The broad gauge (1,520 mm), a legacy of Imperial Russian and Soviet times, dominates the landscape, and narrow-gauge railways (750 mm) also exist, but plans are being made to construct, restore or switch to more standard-gauge railways (1,435 mm) for better train connections with the rest of Europe. About half of railways in Ukraine are electrified (some of which have been damaged during the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War and temporarily switched to diesel trains). Railways by gauge Broad gauge (1,520 mm) As of 2020, the total length of the main broad-gauge (1,520 mm) railroad network was . The total length of electrified broad-gauge lines (with the