MOSCOW – Three years after a war in eastern Ukraine, the Trump administration, in a sharp break with Obama-era politics, proposed providing the Ukrainian army with powerful American weapons, anti-tank javelin missiles, to aid their fight backed by Russia. separatists
Russia’s President Vladimir V. Putin responded with an ominous warning, saying that weapons in separatist regions could easily be shipped “to other conflict zones,” which many saw as Afghanistan.
Russia’s complaints against what it sees as American intimidation and expansion into its own spheres of influence have accumulated for decades, beginning with the CIA’s role in arming mujahideen fighters who, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, they not only dealt a fatal blow to the invading Red Army but to the entire Soviet Union.
A deep pit of bitterness created by past and current conflicts in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and, more recently, Syria, where US forces killed dozens of Russian mercenaries in 2018, help explain why Russia, according to US intelligence officials, He has become so entangled with the Taliban. . In Ukraine, the Trump administration did send Javelins but with the stipulation that they will not be used in war.
Russian officials and commentators reacted furiously to a report last week in The New York Times that a unit of Russia’s military intelligence agency, known as GRU, had gone so far last year as to pay Taliban rewards for kill American soldiers in Afghanistan.
They scoffed at the idea that Russia would hire assassins from a radical Islamist group that is banned in Russia as a “terrorist” team and that shares many views of Afghan fighters who killed so many Red Army soldiers and Islamic militants that caused Moscow so much pain in Chechnya during two wars there.
Speaking to a state news agency on Monday, Zamir Kabulov, Putin’s special envoy to Afghanistan and a former ambassador to Kabul, rejected the Taliban rewards report as “blatant lies” generated by “forces in the United States that do not want to leave Afghanistan and want to justify their own failures. “
However, amid a torrent of outraged denials, there have been punctual reminders that, in Russia’s view, the United States, because of its overreach abroad, deserves to try some of its own medicine.
Speaking during a talk show on state television dominated by conspiracy theories about the conspiracies of President Trump’s Democratic rivals, Aleksei Zhuravlyov, a member of the Russian Parliament, reminded viewers that, as far as Russia is concerned, States United has waited for it.
Recalling Operation Cyclone, the CIA’s secret support program for Moscow’s enemies in Afghanistan during the 1980s, Zhuravlyov said the United States had “killed thousands upon thousands” of Russians. “This is a mathematical fact.”
While dismissing reports of Russian rewards for American scalps as bogus, he said, “Suppose this happened,” and asked how many Americans perhaps had been killed as a result. “Only 22,” he replied.
There is no evidence to date that Putin has signed a program to kill US soldiers in Afghanistan, and even independent experts say they very much doubt that he did.
However, Russia under Mr. Putin’s command has throbbed for years with real and imagined pain for the damage inflicted by the United States, in particular the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a desire to make it pay.
Andrei Serenko, an expert at the Center for the Study of Contemporary Afghanistan in Moscow, said that Russia has no real desire to see the United States leave Afghanistan and delights in the United States’ agonies of an endless conflict that he described as ” painful blister for America. ” . “
Still, he said, Russia has been preparing for an eventual withdrawal by cultivating ties with the Taliban, as well as with several Afghan warlords. It has done so with money and other incentives in hopes of shaping future Afghan events and securing a useful instrument to hit Washington.
The Taliban, like many other Afghan groups, he added, have a long history of administering protection scams and taking cash from foreigners, including Russians, Americans and Chinese. “This is what they do,” he said. “They are the most successful businesses in Afghanistan.”
Russia, he said, “decided that if we can create a lot of problems for the Americans in Afghanistan, they will create fewer problems for us in Ukraine and Syria.”
Moscow has been reaching out to the Taliban for years, beginning in 1995, when Kabulov traveled to Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold in the south, to negotiate the release of the Russian pilots who had been taken hostage.
The pilots eventually escaped with their planes in what was described at the time as a bold escape. But what really happened is unclear. However, one thing that seems certain is that this first Russian negotiation with the Taliban revolved around money.
“It was all about the money,” recalled Vasily Kravtsov, a former KGB officer during the Soviet war and until 2018 a Russian diplomat in Kabul, about the hostage talks.
Mr. Kravtsov denied that Russia had since paid the Taliban rewards for the deaths of the coalition soldiers, even when he recalled that the Soviet soldiers had been killed in large numbers by the American weapons supplied to the mujahideen. He said he himself had been wounded twice by weapons “purchased with US funds.”
Igor Yerin, who fought in Afghanistan as a young Red Army recruit in the 1980s, said he never saw any Americans on the battlefield, but “they were everywhere because of their stingers.”
The stingers were anti-aircraft missiles provided to mujahideen fighters by the United States as part of a secret CIA program. They allowed the mujahideen to shoot down hundreds of Soviet planes and helicopters, changing the course of the decade-long war.
Now the curator of a small museum in Moscow commemorating the glorious Afghan war, Yerin showed an exhibition of landmines and other weapons dispatched to kill the Russians as part of the CIA program.
Putin has played with this and other sources of Russian pain for years. Shortly after coming to power two decades ago, he pledged support for President George W. Bush in his “with or against us” war against terrorism in 2001 and cooperated with the United States’ drive to overthrow the Taliban. But he quickly soured on the idea that Washington could be a trusted partner and began blaming him for most of the world’s problems.
Bristling with wounded pride, Putin, in a fiery speech in Munich in 2007, denounced what he said was a “world of a teacher, a sovereign” and complained that “the United States has surpassed its national borders, in all areas “
Since then, he has been adjusting scores, often with the help of the GRU, which even before Putin took power had gained his momentum by putting the United States in his place. Since taking office, the military intelligence agency has been accused of being involved in the fabrication of widespread mischief, following a failed 2016 coup attempt in Montenegro with the aim of preventing the Balkan nation from entering NATO and meddle the same year in the United States presidential election.
In a rare recent interview, former GRU chief Valentin Korabelnikov told state television how his officers in 1999 had staged a frantic race for Russian troops and armor to Kosovo to occupy the airport in the capital Pristina, only a few hours before the arrival of NATO forces. The trick, he said, was “about the prestige of our state” and showed that Russia could not be ignored.
Speaking in his former office at GRU headquarters in Moscow, Mr. Korabelnikov said that his agency had organized many other secret operations but that they could not be disclosed.
“The vast majority of operations carried out by both us and our brothers,” he said, referring to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service and the Federal Security Service, known as the FSB and spearheaded in the late 1990s by the Mr. Putin, “they are completely closed.” , and only sometimes does the little tip of the iceberg appear. “
Mark Galeotti, an expert on the Russian security apparatus who wrote a doctorate on the disastrous Afghan Moscow war, said that “some old warhorses” at the GRU could have hatched a plan to kill Americans in revenge for the murdered Russians with American weapons in Afghanistan. But he said he doubted that the plan had been approved by the Russian leadership or executed without approval as a “maverick operation.”
Even Mr. Yerin, the former recruit who lost friends in Afghanistan, recalled that during his tour there, which mainly happened near the northern city of Kunduz, he never believed that the political commissioners in his unit explained that the 1979 Soviet invasion was necessary to maintain the United States. States moving to Russia’s backyard.
“Today I believe you,” said Mr. Yerin. “Afghanistan is our next door neighbor,” he said, stabbing the southern border of the former Soviet Union on a large wall map, “What happens here is our business, not that of the Americans.”
Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.
