My airline led rescue efforts in Ukraine – Trump's peace deal will fail
An airline boss who helped rescue almost 1,000 people from Ukraine as Russian tanks crossed the border in 2022 said he is pessimistic about prospects for peace.
Peter Foster, chief executive at Air Astana, the flag carrier of Kazakhstan, said progress towards a ceasefire in talks brokered by the US appears a distant prospect.
Mr Foster said he is keen to restore flights to Ukraine should the conflict end, but regards the 'wildly changing' views emanating from Washington, Moscow and Kyiv as a negative sign.
He said: 'I can't see it. If it happens it happens, but we are not counting on it. Just like everybody else, we wake up every morning and the news has changed overnight.'
Mr Foster found himself caught up in the 2022 invasion after joining an Air Astana flight to Kyiv to evacuate Kazakh expatriates. Russia mobilised just hours after he landed, however, forcing the plane to leave and scuppering plans for an airlift.
The Briton instead helped organise a fleet of buses and cars which carried 896 evacuees on the slow journey to the Polish border as Moscow's forces began pounding Ukraine.
He said: 'We landed at 10 past midnight, that aircraft left an hour later, and the bombs and missiles started falling at about 4:50am.
'So we had to bus them out and fly them from Poland. I remember driving late at night after about an hour and a half's sleep, trying to negotiate my way down the autoroute.'
Air Astana has not flown to Ukraine or Russia since, while its network of services to Europe, formerly the focus of operations, remains disrupted by the closure of Russian airspace.
Mr Foster said the airline, which he has led for almost 20 years, is not currently planning for a lifting of the flight ban and the restoration of once lucrative routes that would permit.
He said 'Fundamentally we don't see any immediate change to that Russian overflight situation.
'We can't see any clarity of what's going to happen, so there's no point as a business planning for something. Everyone is entitled to a political view but we are business people.'
Mr Foster said that if the war was to end, however, there would be sufficient demand for flights to Ukraine even after the exodus of Kazakhs from the country.
He said: 'There are tons and tons of Ukrainians here. If the war ended and things got back to some sort of normality we'd fly to all of these places, there'd be a market.
'There has always been a lot of movement between countries of the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States], for study or work or because of marriage. So we would like to fly there again one day.'
Air Astana's UK services remain popular despite disruption from airspace closures, with the airline having added an extra fuel tank to a long-range Airbus jet in order to carry on flying direct. London services previously had to refuel at an airport near the Caspian Sea.
Air Astana also flies to Germany. Mr Foster said flights to France and Italy might be viable in future, though most growth now is coming from Asia and the Middle East, helping to increase earnings 16pc last year.
The airline's London-listed stock remains down around a third following a float last year, however.
Mr Foster said a lack of liquidity is holding it back – a common complaint as the market falls far behind historic rival New York – and announced a dividend he said was among the highest in the airline industry to help spur investor interest.
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