Senior Russian and Afghan defense officials held talks in Moscow on Thursday as both sides move to expand military and technical cooperation.
According to Afghan state media, including Bakhtar News Agency, a delegation from Afghanistan’s Ministry of National Defense led by Deputy Defense Minister Mohammad Qasim Farid traveled to Moscow, where they met with a Russian delegation headed by Deputy Defense Minister Vasily Osmakov. Discussions focused on expanding military and technical cooperation as well as addressing shared regional security challenges.
Russia remains the only country to have formally recognized the Taliban-led government, officially known as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), granting recognition in July of last year. While Kabul maintains varying degrees of diplomatic engagement with regional states, Moscow has steadily expanded its political and security dialogue with Afghan authorities since the IEA returned to power in 2021.
Thursday’s meeting marked the first publicly acknowledged high-level engagement between Russian and Afghan defense officials, though informal or lower-level coordination is widely believed to have been taking place earlier. In July 2024, Kabul appointed a military attaché to its embassy in Moscow, a move that signaled the gradual normalization of defense relations.
Afghanistan possesses significant quantities of Soviet-era military equipment, including tanks, armored vehicles, artillery systems, and multiple launch rocket systems originally supplied during the 1980s. Much of this equipment survived the collapse of the Soviet-backed government in 1992, the subsequent civil war, and was later placed in storage or military boneyards following the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.
Some estimates suggest that by 2021, the volume of aging Soviet equipment in Afghanistan may have rivaled or even exceeded the quantity of NATO-supplied hardware held by the former Afghan National Army prior to its collapse. After the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021 and the reorganization of the armed forces under the Islamic National Army, Soviet-era systems began to reappear in service following refurbishment efforts and were later showcased during military parades.
These developments have fueled speculation that Russia may be assisting Kabul in restoring and maintaining legacy equipment, further underscoring the growing military relationship between the two countries as Moscow consolidates its influence in Central and South Asia.