Russia: No bounties paid for troops slain by Taliban
But based on bitter history, belief is the US had it coming
MOSCOW — Three years into a grinding war in eastern Ukraine, the Trump administration, in a sharp break with Obama-era policy, proposed providing the Ukrainian army with potent American weapons, Javelin anti-tank missiles, to aid its struggle with Russianbacked separatists.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia responded with an ominous warning, saying weapons in the separatist regions could easily be sent “to other zones of conflict” — which many took to mean Afghanistan.
Russia’s grievances against what it sees as American bullying and expansion into its own zones of influence have been stacking up for decades, starting with the CIA’s role in arming mujahedeen fighters who, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, delivered a fatal blow to the invading Red Army and the entire Soviet Union.
A deep well of bitterness created by past and current conflicts in Afghanistan, Ukraine and more recently Syria, where U.S. forces killed scores of Russian mercenaries in 2018, help explain why Russia, according to U.S. intelligence officials, has become so closely entangled with the Taliban. In Ukraine, the Trump administration did send Javelins but with the stipulation that they not be used in the war.
Russian officials and commentators reacted with fury to a recent New York Times report that a unit of Russia’s military intelligence agency, known as the GRU, had gone so far last year as to pay the Taliban bounties to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
They scoffed at the idea that Russia would hire killers from a radical Islamist group that is banned in Russia as a “terrorist” outfit and that shares many views of the Afghan fighters who killed so many Red Army soldiers, and those of Islamic militants who caused Moscow so much pain in Chechnya during two wars there.
In remarks to a state news agency Monday, Zamir Kabulov, Putin’s special envoy for Afghanistan and a former ambassador in Kabul, dismissed the Taliban bounties report as “outright lies” generated by “forces in the United States who don’t want to leave Afghanistan and want to justify their own failures.”
Amid a torrent of outraged denials, however, there have been pointed reminders that, in Russia’s view, the U.S., because of its overreach overseas, deserves to taste some of its own medicine.
Speaking during a talk show on state television dominated by conspiracy theories about plots by President Donald Trump’s Democratic rivals, Aleksei Zhuravlyov, a member of the Russian parliament, reminded viewers that as far as Russia was concerned, the U.S. has long had it coming.
Recalling Operation Cyclone, the CIA’s secret program of support for Moscow’s enemies in Afghanistan during the 1980s, Zhuravlyov said the U.S. had “killed thousands and thousands” of Russians.
While dismissing reports of Russian bounties for American scalps as untrue, he said, “Let’s suppose this happened,” and asked how many Americans had perhaps been killed as a result. “Only 22,” he responded.
There is no evidence that
Putin signed off on any program to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, and even independent experts say they strongly doubt he would have done so.
Yet, Russia under Putin has for years throbbed with real and imagined pain from hurt inflicted by the U.S., notably the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a desire to make it pay.
Moscow has been reaching out to the Taliban for years, starting in 1995 when Kabulov traveled to Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold in the south, to negotiate the release of Russian pilots who had been taken hostage.
The pilots eventually got away with their aircraft in what was described at the time as a daring escape. But what really happened is unclear. One thing that seems certain, however, is that this first Russian negotiation with the Taliban revolved around money.
“Everything was based on money,” Vasily Kravtsov, a former KGB officer during the Soviet war and until 2018 a Russian diplomat in Kabul, recalled of the hostage talks.
Kravtsov denied Russia had since paid the Taliban bounties for the deaths of coalition soldiers, even as he recalled that Soviet soldiers had been killed in large numbers by American arms supplied to the mujahedeen. He said he himself had been wounded twice by weapons “bought with American funds.”
Igor Yerin, who fought in Afghanistan as a young Red Army conscript in the 1980s, said he never saw any Americans on the battlefield but “they were everywhere because of their Stingers.”
Stingers were anti-aircraft missiles provided to mujahedeen fighters by the U.S. as part of a covert CIA program. They enabled the mujahedeen to shoot down hundreds of Soviet planes and helicopters, turning the tide in the decadelong war.