Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov asked Afghanistan’s neighbors to refuse to host U.S. or NATO military forces withdrawing from Afghanistan, Reuters’s Olafimihan Oshin reported yesterday. “We…call on Afghanistan’s neighboring countries not to allow a military presence of U.S. and NATO forces which plan to move there after leaving Afghan territory,” Lavrov said. He was speaking over video at a conference about Afghanistan held in Tehran, Iran, with representatives from China, Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan in attendance.
The Russian government is worried, both about terrorists claiming to be refugees from Afghanistan in order to move from Afghanistan into Central Asia, and about Western powers expanding their presence in an area once occupied by the Soviet Union, which Russia now views as a defensive buffer to Russia’s south, Reuters says.
