Russia slams claims it aided Taliban attacks on US troops

MOSCOW: Russia on Saturday denounced as “baseless” and dangerous a newspaper report claiming that Moscow’s spies had offered rewards to Taliban-linked militants to kill troops of the US-led coalition in Afghanistan.

The New York Times reported Friday that bounties offered by a notorious arm of Russia’s military intelligence service gave incentives to fighters to target US forces, just as US President Donald Trump tries to withdraw troops and end America’s longest war.

The “baseless and anonymous accusations,” published by the newspaper, had “already led to direct threats to the life of employees of the Russian Embassies in Washington D.C. and London,” the Russian Embassy in Washington wrote on Twitter. “Stop producing #fakenews that provoke life threats, @nytimes,” it added in a later tweet. Russia has a tortured history in Afghanistan, where the former Soviet Union in its final years was bogged down in a devastating fight against Islamist guerrillas, then backed by Washington.

But Russia has more recently been accused by the United States of quietly providing small arms to the Taliban.

According to the newspaper, the Taliban operation was led by a unit known as the GRU, which has been blamed in numerous international incidents including a 2018 chemical weapons attack in Britain that nearly killed Russian-born double agent Sergei Skripal.