Putin has been scheming. And it isn’t looking good.
Now Vladimir Putin made a huge move that put America on the back foot.
The Worst Predicted Consequence Of The Afghanistan Withdrawal Is Now Official.
The critics warned this would happen. And now Russia and the Taliban have signed a formal military cooperation pact — cementing the geopolitical void left behind when American forces withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021 in what many consider the most chaotic and consequential foreign policy collapse in a generation.
The deal was finalized Wednesday at an international security forum in Russia, following a meeting between Russian Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu and Afghan Defense Minister Mohammad Yaqoob — the Taliban’s former military commander and the son of Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar, who himself forged a close alliance with Osama bin Laden and provided the sanctuary from which al Qaeda planned the September 11 attacks. Neither Moscow nor Kabul has shared the specific terms of the military agreement, but the symbolism is unambiguous.
“Afghanistan and Russia have long and historical relations,” Yaqoob said at the meeting. “In this direction, we want to move further. We have expanded bilateral relations.”
That is the measured public statement. What it reflects, in practice, is the completion of a strategic repositioning that began the moment the last American troops left Kabul.
What Moscow Was Waiting For — And What Biden’s Withdrawal Gave Them
Understanding the Russia-Taliban pact requires understanding what it means for Russia’s strategic posture in Central Asia and what it costs the United States.
For decades, American military presence in Afghanistan gave Washington an outpost in one of the world’s most strategically significant regions — on Russia’s southern flank, adjacent to China’s western border, and within range of the Central Asian states that both Moscow and Beijing view as their sphere of influence. That presence was imperfect and costly, but it was real leverage in the great-power competition.
Its removal handed Russia a gift. As Nikita Smagin, an expert on Russia’s regional policy, noted in a Carnegie Endowment analysis: “Moscow needs to take steps that will restore its image as an influential power that holds the initiative, and recognition of the Taliban regime serves precisely that purpose.” Russia became the first country in the world to formally recognize the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in 2024. The military pact signed Wednesday is the follow-on to that recognition.
In 2021, Putin had already begun laying groundwork, acknowledging the possibility of lifting Russia’s classification of the Taliban as a terrorist organization. By 2024, he was calling them “allies in the fight against terrorism.” Now they are formal military partners. The diplomatic runway was built over three and a half years — and it began the week American helicopters left the Kabul embassy roof.
The Broader Picture — And What It Means Going Forward
The Russia-Taliban alliance cannot be assessed in isolation. It connects to a series of simultaneous geopolitical moves that represent the most aggressive Russian repositioning since the Cold War. Putin this week also signed a $16.5 billion nuclear energy pact with Kazakhstan — placing Russian nuclear infrastructure on a second Central Asian nation’s soil. Moscow is building what Shoigu described as a “pragmatic dialogue” with Kabul encompassing security, trade, culture, and humanitarian support.
At the same Wednesday forum, Shoigu called on Western nations to unfreeze sanctioned Afghan assets and “bear the burden of the country’s post-conflict reconstruction” — an audacious demand from the country that just formalized a military alliance with the regime whose policies those sanctions were designed to pressure.
The Trump administration has not yet responded publicly to the pact. Trump has made clear, in general terms, that he views Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal as the worst foreign policy decision in modern American history — a position that Wednesday’s news does nothing to undercut. The question now is what, if anything, the United States does about a formally militarized Russian presence in Afghanistan, and whether the Central Asian states that still maintain military partnerships with Washington take the pact as a signal to accelerate their own realignment with Moscow. The board has been set. The pieces are in motion.
