KABUL (Dispatches) – Russia urges the United States to display a responsible approach in pulling out its troops from Afghanistan, Deputy Secretary of Russia’s Security Council Alexander Venediktov said.
“This pullout should be carried out in a responsible manner to make sure that it does not affect security in the Afghan space. This is the most important thing for us,” the Russian security official told TASS.
The issue of whether the U.S. troop pullout “will influence the negotiations [on settling the situation in the country] negatively or positively is of secondary nature”, he added.
Time will show how this troop pullout was implemented. But we are primarily urging our Western partners, first of all, the United States, to show this responsible approach in the pullout [of the troops from Afghanistan], he stressed.
Clashes between the Afghan government troops and the Taliban intensified after U.S. President Joe Biden announced a decision in April to wrap up the operation in Afghanistan that had been the longest overseas military campaign in the U.S. history.
China has also accused Washington of conducting a hasty and chaotic withdrawal, after almost 20 years of war in the county.
“The U.S. disregards its responsibilities and duties and withdraws troops from Afghanistan hastily, dumping the mess and war on the Afghan people and countries in the region,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told a briefing on Friday.
China urged its citizens to leave Afghanistan “as soon as possible.”
The “complex and severe domestic security situation” prompted the evacuation warning, said the ministry.
The Taliban say they now hold 85 percent of Afghanistan, controlling about 250 of the country’s nearly 400 districts.
The group on Saturday captured a district in the province of Laghman, neighboring Kabul.
Local Afghan officials, meanwhile, said the militants captured an important district in Herat province, home to tens of thousands of minority Shia Hazaras.
Afghan authorities say they are prepared to recapture a key border crossing in western Afghanistan that has fallen to the Taliban.
The militant group said it had seized two crossings in western Afghanistan on Friday.
Herat governor spokesman Jilani Farhad said Saturday that Afghan authorities were deploying reinforcements to retake Islam Qala post, the biggest trade crossing between Iran and Afghanistan.
“They will be sent there soon,” Farhad told AFP.
Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry spokesman Tareq Arian said efforts were under way to dislodge the Taliban from their newly acquired positions.