Russian President Vladimir Putin has welcomed the Taliban and said the West should not impose ‘outside values’ on Afghanistan.
He criticised the ‘irresponsible policy’ and said ‘you cannot impose standards of political life and behaviour on other people from outside’. It comes as China has also moved towards recognising the Taliban regime.
Putin said it was not in Russia’s interests to dwell on the result of the 20-year-old US military campaign in Afghanistan, which has ended in humiliating scenes of chaos at Kabul airport as states frantically try to evacuate their citizens.
And he went on to call on allies to unite to help the people of Afghanistan amid mounting evidence the hardline Islamist regime has immediately returned to brutally oppressing the population – despite promising to be ‘moderate’.
Putin added Russia was interested in the country being stable and called on the global community to prevent the ‘collapse’ of Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover.
‘The Taliban movement control almost the entire territory of the country,’ he told a televised press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the Kremlin.
‘These are the realities and it is from these realities that we must proceed, preventing the collapse of the Afghan state,’ he added.
Both leaders said Afghanistan figured prominently during the outgoing German leader’s final working visit to Russia.
The Russian president also highlighted the importance of preventing ‘terrorists’ from entering neighbouring countries from Afghanistan, including ‘under the guise of refugees’.
Moscow has been cautiously optimistic about the new leadership in Kabul and is seeking contact with the militants in an effort to avoid instability spilling over to neighbouring ex-Soviet states.
The Kremlin has in recent years reached out to the Taliban – which is banned as an ‘extremist’ group in Russia – and hosted its representatives in Moscow several times, most recently last month.
The Taliban have been at pains to present a reformed image since marching into Kabul this weekend after US president Joe Biden’s abandonment of Afghanistan.
But a there is mounting evidence that the hardline Islamist regime is anything but reformed from the despotic jihadists of 20 years ago, who brutally oppressed women and allied themselves with Al Qaeda terrorists.
Now those realities are being exposed, and Afghanistan’s new rulers have proven beyond what little doubt there was that they are just as bloodthirsty and tyrannical as their equivalents from two decades ago.