Russia and the Taliban maintain only political relations and do not cooperate in the military field, Sukheil Chakine, the movement’s spokesman, told the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.
In a telephone interview with RIA Novosti, the official representative of the Taliban, Soukheil Chakine denounced information concerning alleged Russian arms sales to the movement.
“Our political office [in Doha e.d.] maintains relations with Russia and with neighboring countries in the region. This is not a military relationship, we strongly reject similar assumptions that may be aimed at undermining a peace agreement (between the Taliban and Washington),” he said.
Regarding the weapons available to the movement, he explained that the Taliban had stocks of weapons in Afghanistan and that they were also buying weapons from the Kabul administration, in particular from the military.
“There were reports that hundreds of thousands of weapons were missing [from Kabul’s military] or stolen from them. So these are the weapons we bought from them. We recovered various things [during the fighting]. So we have a lot of ammunition. And all this was received from the Kabul administration,” he explained.
New York Times article
On June 26, the New York Times wrote that Russian agents had quietly distributed money to fighters “close to the Taliban” to kill American or NATO soldiers on Afghan soil.
This information, taken up by the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, was denounced by Donald Trump, who considered them to be new fake news.
The Russian Foreign Ministry also described this information as the “umpteenth intox launched in the media space by the American secret services”.
