Published: June 04, 2026, 04:34 UTC
# Moscow’s New Friends: Why Russia Is Courting the Taliban
Russia is hosting Taliban defense officials in Moscow, signing military cooperation deals, and building a relationship that deliberately undermines the Western policy of isolating the regime.
The hall at the Patriot Congress and Exhibition Center outside Moscow was filled with generals, defense ministers, and security officials from across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The annual Moscow International Security Forum is Russia’s showpiece event — a stage where the Kremlin projects itself as a great power broker, as a builder of alternatives to the Western-led security order. Among the delegates this year, one figure stood out: Mullah Yaqoob Mujahid, the Taliban’s defense minister and the son of the movement’s founder, Mullah Omar.
The Russians rolled out the red carpet. Mujahid was photographed in deep conversation with Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov. He met separately with Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council, and with Sergei Shoigu, the former defense minister who now runs the Security Council’s military-industrial portfolio. The message was unmistakable. What was once a back-channel relationship conducted through intermediaries and intelligence officers has become a public diplomatic courtship.
Russia has not formally recognized the Taliban government. No country has. But that technicality is becoming harder to sustain as the two sides deepen their cooperation. In the margins of the security forum, Russian and Taliban officials signed a memorandum on military-technical cooperation — a document that one Russian defense ministry spokesman described as laying the groundwork for “practical interaction on regional security.” The precise terms were not published, which is itself revealing. What Moscow is doing is careful, calibrated, and designed to keep maximum options open.
What Russia Gets
The Kremlin’s courtship of the Taliban is not sentimental. It is hard-nosed strategic calculation, driven by three distinct interests.
The first is countering the United States. The American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 was, from Moscow’s perspective, a strategic gift — proof that the US could be made to retreat. But the withdrawal also left a vacuum, and Washington has by no means abandoned Central Asia. The United States maintains military bases in the region, conducts joint exercises with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and still has drone and intelligence infrastructure that can reach Afghanistan. Russia wants the Taliban government as a wedge — a friendly power in Kabul that will deny the US any future military foothold in Afghanistan and perhaps complicate American efforts to rebuild any kind of presence in Central Asia more broadly.
The second interest is leverage over Russia’s own neighbors. The Central Asian republics — Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan — are nominally Russia’s allies, members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. But their loyalties are pragmatic, not absolute. All of them fear instability spilling over from Afghanistan. Tajikistan shares a long border with Afghanistan and has seen periodic clashes with Taliban fighters on the frontier. Uzbekistan worries about the radicalization of its own population. Both countries have watched Russia’s rapprochement with the Taliban with deep unease. For Moscow, that unease is useful. A Russia that can talk to the Taliban is a Russia that controls access — to Kabul, to Afghan security guarantees, to the levers that can either calm or inflame the border. The Central Asian states need Moscow more when Moscow is the one with the Taliban’s ear.
The third interest is economic. Afghanistan sits on perhaps $1 trillion to $3 trillion in untapped mineral wealth — copper, iron, lithium, rare earths, gold, and gems. Much of this is in areas now under Taliban control. China has been the most aggressive in pursuing access, with Chinese companies signing contracts for the Mes Aynak copper mine and other projects. Russia does not want to be locked out. Moscow sees the Taliban as gatekeepers for the next phase of Central Asian resource extraction — not just in Afghanistan itself but across the region, where Russian companies compete with Chinese and Western interests for access to lithium and rare earth deposits that are critical for the global energy transition. A friendly Kabul is a strategic asset in that competition.
What the Taliban Gets
The relationship is transactional, and the Taliban have their own calculus. What they need most is legitimacy. Since retaking power in August 2021, the Taliban leadership has governed a country that no one recognizes. No foreign embassies operate in Kabul. The sanctions regime remains tight. The Afghan central bank’s reserves, frozen overseas, remain largely inaccessible. The economy is in a state of managed collapse, kept alive by humanitarian aid and a thriving opium trade that the Taliban has attempted to suppress with limited success.
Russia offers a path out of this isolation. A public relationship with a permanent member of the UN Security Council — a nuclear power, no less — is a form of de facto recognition. It signals to other countries that dealing with the Taliban is acceptable. It opens channels for trade, for investment, for political dialogue. When the Taliban’s defense minister walks the halls of a Moscow conference center, exchanging handshakes with generals from India, Pakistan, Iran, and China, the diplomatic isolation of the regime becomes a little less airtight.
The Taliban also get a patron. Russia has been willing to advocate for the Taliban in international forums, to argue against harsh sanctions, to push back against what Moscow calls a “neo-colonial” Western approach to Afghanistan. At the UN, Russia has consistently supported the Taliban’s request to take over Afghanistan’s seat at the United Nations — a request the United States has blocked. In the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Russia has pushed for the Taliban to be given observer status. These are incremental steps, but they add up.
There is a specific military dimension as well. Taliban battlefield commanders have said publicly that they seek Russian weapons and spare parts. Most of the Taliban’s equipment is American-made, captured from the Afghan army during the 2021 offensive. These weapons require maintenance, spare parts, and ammunition that the Taliban cannot produce themselves. Russia has the capacity to supply some of this, perhaps indirectly, and to help the Taliban service Soviet-era systems still in use. But here the limits of the relationship become visible.
The Limits
What Russia can actually offer the Taliban in military terms is modest. Russia’s own army is consumed by the war in Ukraine, which has depleted stockpiles, exposed logistical weaknesses, and absorbed the attention of the military leadership. The Russian defense industry is running flat out to supply its own forces. There is not much left over for Afghanistan.
Analysts who follow the relationship note this asymmetry. Dmitry Gorenburg, a security expert at Harvard’s Davis Center, puts it plainly: “Russia essentially has nothing to offer the Taliban in terms of military hardware right now. The relationship is more about diplomatic signaling and information-sharing than about any real transfer of capability.” A senior European intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told this reporter that Russian military intelligence — the GRU — has maintained contact with Taliban intelligence since before the 2021 takeover and that the relationship is primarily about “knowing what is happening in Afghanistan and making sure the Taliban knows what Moscow wants.” It is an intelligence liaison, not a military alliance.
The limits are not just material. They are also strategic. Russia and the Taliban have different enemies. The Taliban is fighting the Islamic State’s Khorasan Province (ISIS-K), a Sunni jihadist group that sees the Taliban as insufficiently extreme. Russia is fighting a war against Ukraine. These are not the same fight. Russia has an interest in the Taliban containing ISIS-K, because ISIS-K has demonstrated an ambition to attack Russia — it was responsible for the Crocus City Hall massacre in Moscow in March 2024, which killed 145 people. But the Taliban has its own reasons for fighting ISIS-K, and it does not need Russian encouragement. The overlap in interests is real but narrow.
The Tensions
The relationship creates tensions that Moscow has not fully resolved. Russia’s Central Asian allies are watching with concern. Tajikistan, which fought a civil war in the 1990s partly fueled by Islamist insurgents, sees the Taliban as an existential threat. The Tajik government has explicitly criticized Russia’s outreach to the Taliban, arguing that it legitimizes a regime that harbors extremist elements. Uzbekistan has been quieter but equally uneasy, maintaining its own direct contacts with the Taliban as a hedge against Moscow’s monopoly.
There is a structural problem here. Russia wants to be the security guarantor of Central Asia — the power that keeps the region stable and protects it from threats emanating from the south. But by befriending the Taliban, Russia is making itself the patron of the very force that Central Asia fears most. This is a difficult contradiction to manage. It works only as long as the Central Asian states have no alternative security provider — no American bases to turn to, no Chinese security umbrella, no independent military capability of their own. That is broadly the case today. But Moscow is gambling that it will remain so.
The Broader Picture
The relationship with the Taliban fits a pattern. Over the past decade, Russia has systematically built ties with governments and movements that the United States and its allies consider pariahs. Iran, where Russia has deepened military cooperation to the point of sharing ballistic missile technology. North Korea, which is now a direct supplier of artillery shells and missiles for Russia’s war in Ukraine. Venezuela, where Russian military advisers and economic support keep the Maduro government afloat. The Wagner Group, the Russian paramilitary outfit that operates across Africa, propping up weak governments in exchange for mining concessions.
These relationships share a common logic. Moscow treats the Western-led international order as a hostile and declining system. Its strategy is not to confront that system head-on, which it cannot do, but to build parallel structures — alternative alliances, alternative security arrangements, alternative economic relationships — that erode the West’s ability to set the rules. The Taliban relationship is one piece of that puzzle. It is not the most important piece. It does not, on its own, change the strategic balance in Central Asia. But it is revealing.
What Russia is doing in Afghanistan is what it is doing everywhere else: finding the places where Western power is weakest, where the rules are most ambiguous, where a determined and unsentimental power can carve out influence at low cost. The Taliban is an ideal partner for this project precisely because it is isolated. Isolated actors have few alternatives. They are cheaper to buy, easier to keep, and less likely to defect.
The danger for Moscow is that this strategy works better in theory than in practice. Russia’s parallel-world alliances have a tendency to produce parallel-world problems. Iran has its own ambitions in the Caucasus and Central Asia that do not align with Moscow’s. North Korea’s nuclear program makes it a liability as much as an asset. The Taliban can deliver on its promises only to the extent that it controls Afghanistan, which is only partly. And the more Russia ties its reputation to the Taliban regime, the more it will be held responsible for the Taliban’s actions — including its treatment of women and girls, its sheltering of terrorist groups, its failure to build a functioning state.
In the short term, the courtship makes sense. Russia gets a presence in Kabul, leverage over its neighbors, and a thumb in the eye of the United States. The Taliban gets legitimacy, a patron, and a seat at tables that were closed to it. Both sides get what they want without promising too much.
In the long term, the relationship rests on the assumption that the Taliban will remain in power, that Russia’s war in Ukraine will eventually end and free up resources for other theaters, and that the Central Asian states will have no alternative but to accept Moscow’s role as the broker between them and the regime in Kabul. Those are big assumptions. And if any of them proves wrong, Moscow’s new friendship with the Taliban may turn out to be not an asset but a trap.