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 Russian-backed separatists.President Vladimir Putin
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 Russian-backed separatists.
Russian officials and commentators reacted with fury to a report last week in The New York Times that U.S. intelligence officials had concluded that Russia’s military intelligence agency had gone so far as to pay bounties to the Taliban and criminal elements linked to it to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
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. There is no evidence to date 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.
The Taliban, like many other Afghan groups, he added, has a long record of running protection rackets and taking cash from foreigners, including Russians, Americans and Chinese. “This is what they do,” he said. “They are Afghanistan’s most successful business.” “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.
Now the curator of a small museum in Moscow commemorating the inglorious Afghan war, Yerin showed off a display of land mines and other weapons sent to kill Russians as part of the CIA program.Soon after coming to power two decades ago, he pledged support for President George W. Bush in his “with or against us” war on terrorism in 2001 and cooperated with America’s drive to oust the Taliban.
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