After the Taliban captured Kabul, other countries hurriedly closed their embassies and want to get all personnel out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible.
Russia is different: Its ambassador will speak to representatives of the Taliban, who have already taken control of the area around the embassy, about the security of the mission, said Samir Kabulov, President Vladimir Putin's special envoy for Afghanistan, on Monday morning on the radio station Echo Moskwy known.
Russia's embassy in Kabul should continue to work, but some of the staff of around one hundred should be taken out of the country.
Friedrich Schmidt
Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.
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Russia's state media had previously reported that the Taliban had promised to guarantee the security of diplomats;
the state news agency Tass quoted a spokesman for the group as saying that they had "good relations with Russia" and wanted to keep the country's embassy and other representations working.
Putin's special envoy tried on Monday to portray the Taliban as a lesser evil compared to other groups: he did not fear that the Taliban would become a new incarnation of the terrorist militia “Islamic State” (IS), said Kabulov and even praised the Taliban: They have "In contrast to the Americans, to the whole of NATO, including the refugee Afghan government", which IS is fighting "mercilessly".
Security measures strengthened in Central Asia
The Taliban had also given credible assurance that they would not “want to repeat their sad fate”, said Kabulov, with a view to the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001. Putin's special envoy wins something good from the Taliban's takeover, because, according to Kabulov, the others extremist groups in Afghanistan are not concentrating on the country itself, but are focusing on Central Asia as a whole, Pakistan or Iran. A series of meetings of officials with Taliban representatives, most recently in Moscow in July, fits in with Moscow's pragmatism, even though the group itself is banned as “terrorist” in Russia, as is ISIS, for example. But despite such steps, people are aware of the threat posed by the Islamist fighters and security measures in Central Asia have been strengthened accordingly.
Russia supplies armaments to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and has held joint military exercises with the armed forces of both countries near their borders with Afghanistan. According to the Russian Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov, the aim was to defend against “terrorist threats”, which are currently mainly coming from “Afghanistan's direction”. Tajikistan, where Moscow maintains its largest foreign military base, has a 1,300-kilometer-long border with Afghanistan; Putin has assured his autocratic counterpart in Dushanbe, Emomali Rachmon, of Russia's full support in protecting the border.
Where the Soviet Union once suffered a disastrous defeat - more than 15,000 Soviet soldiers were killed during the invasion of the 1980s - the image of the Western supremacy, the United States, has now suffered enormous damage. For a long time, Moscow supported the Western mission, allowing the Americans, for example, to use their own airspace to supply troops. Only the worsening of relations in recent years does America's withdrawal and now the debacle, from Moscow's point of view, appear as a correction of the turning point of 2001, the invasion and years of massive Western troops in Afghanistan. In recent weeks Moscow has opposed American attempts to establish new military bases in Central Asia.
Historical experience speaks for the fact that Moscow's malicious joy is not getting out of hand: the chaos after the Soviet withdrawal is related to the end of the Soviet Union, to the civil war in the allied Tajikistan in the early 1990s and also to Russia's own terror problem in the North Caucasus. Moscow's foreign policy expert Konstantin Kosachev has now warned that it cannot be ruled out that the Taliban and IS will come to an understanding, which would increase the danger for Russia and its allies.