Taliban wants to create air defense in Afghanistan with help from Russia, but Kremlin has problems because of Ukraine – media

The Taliban wants to create an air defense system for Afghanistan with Russian help, but the Kremlin is likely to have problems with this because of the war with Ukraine. Forbes writes about this.

According to journalists, the Taliban allocated most of Afghanistan’s budget to defense in early 2023.

Taliban commander and chief of staff Qari Fasihuddin Fitrat said at the time, “Anti-aircraft missiles are necessary for the countries.”

Important

According to him, the Taliban is doing everything possible to obtain these weapons. Later, General Sayed Abdul Basir Saberi told Russian media that the Taliban has ground equipment, and Kabul wants to buy air defense systems from the Russian Federation.

“We plan to purchase Russian equipment that will allow us to create air defense in the future,” he added.

It was noted that the Taliban general’s statement was made after Russia showed that it was ready to arm the Houthis with anti-ship missiles and even transfer the Pantsir-S1 medium-range anti-aircraft missile system to Hezbollah via Syria.

The transfer of Pantsirs or short- and medium-range systems such as Buk and Thor to the Taliban would undoubtedly alarm the United States, journalists said. Moreover, the creation of an air defense system in Afghanistan could complicate the West’s drone operations. Thus, the Taliban said that American UAVs were patrolling and “violating” Afghan airspace.

There is also a risk, as noted in the materials, that any air defense system supplied by Russia could become a threat to civilian aircraft. Afghanistan’s airspace has become a key route between Europe and Asia, and aircraft that have been avoiding it for years have increased the number of flights over the country due to rising tensions between Israel and Iran in the Middle East.

Russia has problems with technology

But Pavel Luzin, a senior fellow at the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis, doubts that Russia will sell modern weapons to the Taliban anytime soon.

“Russia is a global menace whose stated goals are clearly and officially to undermine the global leadership of the United States and the entire world order,” he said.

Luzin explained that within the framework of these stated goals, Russia has shown that it is ready to deal with any global “criminal garbage”. On the other hand, the Kremlin cannot export modern weapons such as the Pantsir and Tor systems because the Russian Armed Forces have lost a lot of equipment in Ukraine, and the Russian military industry is struggling to compensate for this.

“The only possible way to supply air defense systems such as the Buk, Tor or Pantsir to Afghanistan is to supply them with crews. The problem is that the Taliban forces are not very well trained to operate these systems,” the expert said.

Remember that the US has officially approved Iran’s missile transfer. Moscow has received ballistic missiles from Tehran. US President Joe Biden will meet with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to discuss attacks on Russia.

Let us recall that Defense Express has calculated how many missiles Iran could transfer to the Russian Federation. The laser illumination on the missile allows it to hit moving targets. They have a shorter range and are similar in capabilities to the pre-Himars missiles.