A little over three decades after the Soviet Union and the mujahideen fought a long and brutal war, Russia officially recognized the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan.
On July 3, Russia became the first country to officially recognize the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan. President Vladimir Putin announced via the state newswire TASS that the Russian Federation would begin using the name “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” for the country and would elevate the Afghan charge d’affaires in Russia to the status of ambassador. That same afternoon, staff at the Afghan Embassy in Moscow lowered the tricolor of the republic and began flying the black and white flag used by the Taliban instead. The Russian ambassador to Afghanistan, Dmitry Zhirnov, said the recognition of the Taliban reflected “a sincere desire of the Russian Federation to establish a full-fledged partnership with Afghanistan.”
It would seem to be an awkward partnership. A little over three decades ago, the Soviet Union and the mujahideen fought in a long and brutal war, which ended in a humiliating Soviet defeat—often called the “Soviet Vietnam”—that may have hastened the Soviet Union’s collapse. What’s more, the Russian government has committed itself in recent years to a politics of history focused on rewriting the story of the Soviet-Afghan War as a heroic, rather than failed, conflict—at the same time as the Kremlin has moved closer to the Taliban. This disconnect reflects the gap between Russia’s efforts to create a usable past to justify its imperial project and the reality of its exercise of power.
The recognition isn’t a sudden move. It reflects the steady improvement of the relationship between Russia and the Taliban over the past decade. In the years before the U.S. withdrawal in 2021, Russia had begun to covertly cultivate ties with the Taliban as it sought to hedge its bets ahead of the impending American exit from the country. During the fall of Kabul, as droves of foreign embassies shuttered and evacuated staff in advance of a Taliban takeover, Russia was one of few countries to keep its embassy open, with diplomatic staff making public pronouncements about how safe they felt in the city—even as bombings and firefights broke out around them.
After the fall of Kabul, Russia quickly went about strengthening its ties with the Taliban. The Russian ambassador was one of the first to set up meetings with Taliban leadership. In subsequent years, representatives from the Taliban have regularly been invited to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, sometimes called the “Russian Davos.” In 2022, as sanctions cut Russia off from the international financial system following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin set up a (relatively) significant trade deal to sell wheat, oil, and gas to Afghanistan. In 2024, after an Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISIS-K) attack on a concert hall in the Moscow region left 149 people dead, Putin described the Taliban as “allies in the fight against terrorism” and expressed his intentions of moving toward full recognition and formal partnership.
Yet despite these connections, Russia had, thus far, stopped short of formal recognition of the Taliban government. The cooperation had been mostly practical, based on Russia’s desire to extend its influence into Central Asia and combat ISIS-K, a mutual enemy of Russia and the Taliban. It was only in April 2025 that the Kremlin pushed for the Russian Supreme Court to remove the Taliban from Russia’s list of banned terrorist entities, paving the way for the possibility of formal recognition.
Thirty years is a long time, and the mujahideen whom the Soviet Union fought in 1979-1989 are not the same as the Taliban who govern Afghanistan today—and, for that matter, the government ruling from the Kremlin is Russian, not Soviet. But it would probably have been surprising to both a mujahideen fighter and a Soviet soldier if you informed them that the leadership of their successor organizations, including some old warriors from both sides, would enjoy a friendly relationship in the years to come.
In December 1979, Soviet troops arrived in Kabul to overthrow one Afghan communist government and replace it with a slightly different one, hoping that the new regime would be more stable. Rather than being able to quickly shore up support and get out, the Soviet army was instead drawn into a protracted conflict with mujahideen rebels covertly armed by the United States. When the Soviet army finally withdrew nearly 10 years later, around 1 million Afghan civilians, as well as 15,000 Soviet soldiers, were dead, and the infrastructure of Afghanistan was in ruins. Within just a few years, the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan would collapse entirely—and so would the Soviet Union itself. In their places, the Taliban and the Russian Federation emerged.
The military loss in Afghanistan was a psychological break in the Soviet Union. In 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev described it as a “bleeding wound,” and the invasion as a political mistake. With censorship eased during glasnost, Soviet journalists began publishing the stories they’d held back, of the war’s negative aspects: casualties, drug abuse among soldiers, even war crimes against Afghan civilians. Public opinion turned sharply negative, not only toward the war but also toward its veterans and, to an extent, toward the Soviet army as a whole. The withdrawal began in 1989.
Public perception of the war, as well as its veterans, remained profoundly negative after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A few months after the last Soviet soldier left the country in February 1989, the Congress of People’s Deputies, the highest governing body of the Soviet Union in its last years, passed a resolution of “moral and political condemnation” of the decision to invade. The Soviet army’s reputation never recovered. The failed war drained Soviet coffers and contributed, to some extent, to the Soviet Union’s terminal financial troubles—though the war’s most significant effect was as a psychological wound, a searing humiliation. It didn’t exactly lead to the collapse but was a contributing factor, reflecting or maybe symptomatic of what seemed to be a fundamental sickness of late Soviet life. For a little over a decade, that remained the general consensus on the war within Russia.
However, that consensus has changed more recently. Over the past decade, the Kremlin and its supporters have been rewriting the history of the Soviet-Afghan War as a triumph—a good and moral war to defeat drug-dealing terrorists, hampered by foolish Western interference and resulting in something like a draw.
The first tentative rewriting of this history began in the early 2000s, in the context of both the global war on terror and Russia’s own brutal war in Chechnya. In that context, the new narrative about the Afghan war was that it was a tragic but prescient failure, a first attempt by Russia to combat terrorism and Islamist extremism. The Soviet Union’s leadership had erred in seeking to establish a socialist Afghanistan, rather than simply flattening Islamist rebels with overwhelming force. But Soviet soldiers, less ideologically committed to communism, were the true heroes, focused on the necessary work of protecting the USSR’s southern border from the first draft of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In 2009, Boris Gromov, the final Soviet soldier to leave Afghanistan, commented that “[t]he Soviet soldier stood in the land of mountains and desert to fight against the forces of international terrorism and drug trafficking, and that is his great merit.”
This new narrative served an opportunistic purpose in aligning Russia with the war on terror, and thus the United States—and in silencing international criticism of Russian war crimes in Chechnya. Famously, Putin was the first foreign leader to call George W. Bush following 9/11 and offer support for the United States, and one of the first world leaders to provide assistance with the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. In 2003, Russia added the Taliban to its list of banned terrorist entities. Upholding the designation, the country’s Supreme Court held that the Taliban “supported illegal terrorist formations in Chechnya” and was thus a direct threat to Russia.
In this version of the story, Putin was correcting the Soviet Union’s errors and honoring Soviet soldiers’ desire to stop international terrorism and protect Russia’s borders. This revisionism fit well with the early Putin years, as narratives of national humiliation and betrayal were already emerging as central themes in Russia’s political culture. It was also in this context that the first official state-sponsored memorials to the Soviet-Afghan War were built, including the monument to internationalist fighters at the memorial complex of the Great Patriotic War in Moscow. In 2004, on the 25th anniversary of the introduction of troops to Afghanistan, Putin described the war’s veterans as role models of selfless devotion and military patriotism.
As Russia’s relations with the West deteriorated, especially after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, the tone of this revisionism also hardened. Gone was the tragedy of the Soviet leadership. Now, the story held that the strong Soviet government, together with brave Soviet soldiers, fought valiantly to protect the Soviet Union from a Western-backed invasion of drug addicts, terrorists, and Americans. And, importantly, the war was no longer a loss or a draw, but a victory. Its veterans are no longer tragic fulfillers of duty, but heroes fulfilling a noble purpose, and the Afghan veterans’ movement has become increasingly aligned—and co-opted—by the Kremlin. This new narrative has taken root among some Russians. In 1991, 88 percent of Russians said they felt that the Afghan war had been unnecessary, compared to 55 percent in 2019. That same year, legislators in Russia’s Duma made serious progress on a resolution to overturn the 1989 condemnation of the war, which one Duma member described as “inconsistent with the principles of historical justice.”
As Russia grappled with how to project power abroad in a post-Soviet world, it sought to use the Afghan war as a historical reference point marking Russian imperial interventions as benevolent, rather than flawed. For this argument to work, the war itself has to have been a noble fight. Over the course of the 21st century, this has become increasingly tied to Russian condemnation of a perfidious West, with Russia seeking to undo one of its foundational contemporary humiliations perpetrated by a degenerate America along with heroin-dealing Islamist terrorists seeking to violate Russian sovereignty.
In this respect, the Kremlin’s effort to turn Afghanistan into a usable past reflects the Russian imperial project. At the same time that Russia’s narratives of the Afghan war curdled into the harsher, more anti-Western story in the 2010s, Russia was also extending its power further into the Middle East with its campaign in Syria. Rewriting Afghanistan was a way of making the more overt employment of Russian imperialism seem more palatable to the Russian public.
This context made Russia’s growing partnership with the Taliban over the course of the late 2010s all the more surreal. The Kremlin’s line was somehow both that the Afghan war was a successful fight to protect the Soviet Union’s southern border from the mujahideen, and that Russia should be more closely aligned with the mujahideen’s successors—which included some of the very same people who had thrown the Soviet Union out of the country in 1989. It was a conflict between Russian efforts to expand the country’s influence in Central Asia and the narratives used to justify those efforts domestically. At times, this dissonance was hard to ignore. The 2019 Duma resolution to overturn the condemnation of the war was quietly quashed—reportedly by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, as it was thought that publicly declaring this narrative would create problems with Russia’s Central Asian partners and its allies in the Taliban.
This narrative of expansion and benevolent Russian invasion culminated in the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The relationship between rehabilitating the war in Afghanistan and recognizing the Taliban has also become more explicit. In May 2024, a Foreign Ministry official described the Taliban as:
former Mujahideen fighters who fought against the Soviet Army …. And after fighting with other foreign troops, they independently came to the conclusion that the USSR not only fought in Afghanistan, but also built. And that the USSR had no aggressive goals. … Yes, the Taliban consider our actions to be erroneous, but at the same time they pay tribute to the real contribution to the modernization of Afghanistan that the USSR made.
Last year, Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian prime minister and current internet crank, made this connection explicitly. He explained Russia’s deepening relationship with the Taliban by saying that, “in the early twenty-first century, we considered the Taliban terrorists, and the Americans—partners in the fight against extremism. It’s different now. And the Americans … now they have become the accomplices of terrorists, because they nurtured the Kiev [sic] neo-Nazi regime.”
Since the war in Ukraine began, these dissonances have become much louder. Following the invasion, Russia required any journalistic reference to entities on the list of illegal terrorist organizations to be specified as such. Because the Taliban was on this list until April 2025, this meant that news coverage of Russia’s warming relationship with the Taliban produced increasingly absurd sentences: For example, “I can’t say that the Taliban (prohibited in Russia and recognized as a terrorist entity) has become our number one friends but they are definitely not enemies[,]” said a Foreign Ministry official. Or “the representative of the Taliban (banned in Russia and recognized as a terrorist entity) came to Moscow in September[.]”
Meanwhile, as Russia is becoming closer with the Taliban, at one Russian orphanage, kidnapped Ukrainian children are indoctrinated into Russian patriotism through lectures about the holy mission of the warriors of Rus’ who fought in Afghanistan.
Acknowledging the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan while prosecuting an imperial war in Ukraine stretches these contradictions even more. Russia is currently attempting to annex Ukraine and extend its power in Central Asia, but its narrative of a benevolent imperialism drawn from its Soviet past is at odds with what its imperialism looks like in practice. As the Kremlin doubles down on the war in Ukraine and seeks to establish an alternative sphere of influence in the region, the question is how long this contradiction can persist before it falls apart—and what it will look like when it does.
– Emily Hoge is an assistant professor of Soviet History at Clemson University. Her forthcoming book, tentatively titled “Combat Brotherhood: Disabled Afghan War Veterans, Traumatic Masculinity and the Mafia State,” studies Russian veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Published courtesy of Lawfare.
