British student rescued from Kabul

KABUL (Agencies): A thrill-seeking British student who had to be evacuated from Kabul after he went there on holiday as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in August is planning to travel to Ukraine. Miles Routledge, 21, told MailOnline he hoped to go to Kharkiv, Donetsk and Crimea, all of which the Foreign Office advised against travelling to.
Ukraine is on the brink of war with Conservative MP Tobias Elwood saying a Russian invasion was ‘imminent’. Mr Routledge, from Birmingham, admitted it was ‘self-destructive behaviour’ but joked he had only bought a one-way flight to save money in case he died. He told MailOnline: ‘I’ve been to Ukraine before so I’m hoping to see something new.
‘I want to see the war. I want to see the feelings of both sides, their opinions and hopefully I’ll see the critical point of the conflict, if it is to come.’ The former Loughborough physics student dismissed people who disapprove of him travelling to dangerous places. He said: ‘I’d say I wish them all the best but truthfully they were never my audience and for every seething comment made against me, behind it was my friends and I eating popcorn and laughing at them.
‘I’ll continue to travel regardless of their opinions, I’ll even go back to Afghanistan and there’s nothing they can do about it.’ He said he was hoping to arrive in Lviv, western Ukraine, on Thursday, after a flight from Luton via Gdansk, Poland. The Foreign Office advised against all travel to Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea yesterday.
It advised against all but essential travel to the rest of Ukraine and urged British people to register their presence in Ukraine. Mr Routledge wrote on Twitter: ‘The flight to Ukraine is cheap as chips. I’ll also be applying for a Russian visa in the meantime, just in case Russia visits me in Ukraine.’ He said he avoided Covid isolation rules by claiming he was an ‘essential journalist with regular international work’.
Mr Routledge, who wears a large silver cross around his neck, has said took ‘supplies’ to rural communities while he was in South Sudan and handed out cash to people in the streets. The African country has been ravaged by civil war and violence since becoming independent in 2011. He was previously evacuated from Kabul after he went to Afghanistan ‘because it was dangerous’.
Mr Routledge has previously bragged of visiting Chernobyl, posting pictures in May saying it was two years since he visited the scene of the 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine. In posts to message board site 4chan and live streaming platform Twitch, he claims he was quizzed by armed Taliban militants while on his way to Kabul International Airport.
They apparently asked him where he was from – to which he said Wales. He claims the fighters did not know where Wales was, and let him go. Mr Routledge says he later came across another armed convoy during the Taliban insurgency and took a selfie on one of their gun emplacements. According to UK defence experts, Vladimir Putin is on the brink of invading Ukraine for a second time – having sent troops into the country’s eastern regions and Crimea in 2014.
His apparent intention is to prevent Ukraine joining Nato, the defensive alliance led by the US and the UK. As a precursor to conflict he issued a set of demands which he surely knew would be rejected, including the withdrawal of Nato troops from all former Soviet republics. Around 100,000 Russian troops are positioned in striking distance of Ukraine and in recent days military hospitals have been built – often an indicator conflict is imminent.
President Joe Biden and Boris Johnson have agreed a package of ‘unprecedented’ economic sanctions against Russia in the event of war. Ukraine doesn’t belong to Nato so there will be no military response, at least not officially. Any military assistance provided by the UK or US will be covert and deniable.Putin wants to force a favourable diplomatic settlement. He may be able to do so if he restricts his offensive to the eastern regions already occupied by pro-Russian separatists. He could then call for that region to become independent from the rest of Ukraine, just as Crimea is.