Analysis: Russia became the first country to recognise the Taliban's government. More than a year later, has Moscow's gamble paid off?
Since the Taliban reclaimed power five years ago, Russia has been the only country to formally recognise it as Afghanistan’s legitimate government.
When Moscow made that decision in July 2025, Russia appeared to be taking a calculated gamble on post-US Afghanistan.
The move formalised a relationship that had already expanded steadily in the preceding years, opening greater space for diplomatic, economic, and security cooperation.
A little more than a year later, however, the results are mixed. Russia has gained a more formal foothold in Kabul and deepened cooperation with the Islamic Emirate on counterterrorism and other issues.
But other governments have declined to follow Moscow’s lead, and the extent to which recognition itself has delivered significant new security gains for Russia is unclear.
The key question is whether Moscow gained a first-mover advantage in post-occupation Afghanistan or traded diplomatic leverage for benefits it could have secured without recognition.
Moscow had maintained open channels with the Taliban for years leading up to July 2025, including on trade, diplomacy, security, energy, and agriculture.
According to Alexey Khlebnikov, a Middle East expert at the Russian International Affairs Council, Moscow’s recognition of Afghanistan’s Islamist rulers reflected the dual goals of “working with reality on the ground” and underscoring “Russia’s role in the region which is essential for its own security and its Central Asian neighbours”.
The move was “not an outstanding step but a logical continuation,” he told The New Arab.
The removal of the Taliban from Russia’s list of terrorist organisations in April 2025 eliminated a legal obstacle to closer cooperation, while formal recognition in July went further by replacing the fiction that Moscow was dealing only with an interim or de facto authority and giving the relationship greater political and legal space.
The subsequent Russia-Afghanistan business forum in Tatarstan and, most significantly, a defence cooperation agreement signed in May 2026 suggest that the relationship has acquired tangible new dimensions.
However, the significance of the defence pact remains difficult to assess because its full text has not been made public. Recognition is therefore best understood as a status upgrade to an already substantive relationship, rather than a diplomatic breakthrough that suddenly transformed ties.
Counterterrorism provides perhaps the clearest practical rationale for Moscow’s engagement with the Taliban. Russia and the Taliban share an interest in combating Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), which threatens Taliban rule and has demonstrated the ability to project violence beyond Afghanistan.
For Moscow, the threat became particularly acute after the March 2024 Crocus City Hall attack, when Russian authorities linked the perpetrators to an ISKP network. The group’s efforts to spread violence into Central Asia are particularly concerning to the Kremlin, given Russia’s interests in the former Soviet republics.
But while recognition has given Moscow a formally recognised interlocutor in Kabul and potentially improved access to intelligence on ISKP and militant networks operating in or around Central Asia, limits still remain.
“We can’t establish that formal recognition produced additional counterterrorism gains beyond those already achieved through pre-existing, largely pragmatic cooperation,” Eleonora Tafuro Ambrosetti of the Italian Institute for International Political Studies told The New Arab.
Russia and the Taliban share an enemy without necessarily sharing the same threat picture. The Taliban is primarily concerned with protecting its rule in Afghanistan, while Moscow is focused on ISKP’s threats to Russia and Central Asia.
Their overlapping interests can sustain intelligence and operational cooperation, but, according to Javid Ahmad, a visiting fellow for National Security at the Wilson Center, it would be inaccurate to view that cooperation as evidence of bilateral trust.
“What Russia is doing is effectively making a calculated bet on a partner it cannot fully trust or fully verify. That brings its current approach closer to a hedging than actual longer-term policy,” he explained to The New Arab.
The significance of recognition also extends beyond Afghanistan itself. For Moscow, the Taliban relationship offers access and influence in a country where Western involvement has sharply receded, while reinforcing Russia's claim to remain an important security actor in Greater Central Asia.
Formal recognition fits a wider Russian strategy of portraying itself as a pragmatic power willing to engage governments regardless of their political system or relationship with the West. Through what Ambrosetti describes as the “we talk to everybody” approach, Russia can present itself as a country that engages with actors others may isolate, without attaching the same democratic conditionality to its diplomacy.
There is also a more explicitly geopolitical dimension. As Alexander Cooley, the Claire Tow Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, noted in a The New Arab interview, Moscow has an interest in emphasising regional instability as a rationale for continued security cooperation and for maintaining its role, including through its military presence in Central Asia.
Recognition can thus be viewed not simply as a policy toward the Islamic Emirate but as part of Russia’s effort to shape the post-US regional order and reinforce its position vis-à-vis Western influence.
Yet, Russia’s first-mover advantage has also exposed the limits of Moscow’s influence. After Moscow’s formal recognition, some analysts expected Russia-friendly regional states to follow suit. But they have not. Instead, Afghanistan’s neighbours have pragmatically worked with Kabul without formal recognition. This does not necessarily amount to a major diplomatic failure.
As Cooley points out, Moscow did not mount anything resembling its vigorous post-2008 campaign to persuade other governments to recognise Abkhazia and South Ossetia. There is therefore little basis for judging the Taliban recognition on the same terms.
Still, the lack of follow-on recognitions is revealing. Other governments appear to have concluded that they can obtain many of the practical benefits of engagement without paying the political cost of recognition.
As Ahmad puts it, Moscow may have been “buying a position” rather than establishing a model for others to follow. Being first demonstrates leadership only if others eventually decide that following serves their interests. This brings us to the central criticism of Moscow’s decision.
Perhaps Russia did not move too quickly in engaging the Taliban, but it moved too quickly in formalising that engagement. There was a strong strategic case for maintaining close ties with Kabul.
Afghanistan’s security environment directly affects Russia's Central Asian interests, and the emergence of ISKP as a threat provided an obvious reason to deepen cooperation. Nonetheless, many of the benefits associated with that cooperation were already available to Moscow before recognition.
The Taliban, by contrast, immediately received an important diplomatic prize, which was the legitimacy and political validation that came with being formally recognised by a global power with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
For Moscow, however, recognition can also be difficult to use as leverage once granted. Russia, therefore, gained access and influence, but potentially surrendered an instrument it could have used to seek concessions from the Taliban later, which appears to be China’s main reason for holding off on recognition of the Afghan regime.
This does not make recognition a strategic blunder. Rather, it suggests that Moscow’s calculation was based on the belief that early access and influence were worth more than the leverage it sacrificed by going first. Whether that calculation proves correct will depend on what Russia can extract from the relationship in the years ahead.
More than a year after Russia’s recognition of the Taliban, the results are mixed. Recognition was not merely symbolic. It removed legal and diplomatic barriers, gave Moscow a formally recognised interlocutor in Kabul, and appears to have helped facilitate deeper Afghan-Russian economic and security cooperation.
However, it did not fundamentally create the bilateral relationship, and the evidence that recognition itself has produced major counterterrorism gains remains inconclusive. Nor has Moscow persuaded other governments to follow its lead.
The result is an unusual form of first-mover advantage, with Russia securing a privileged diplomatic position in Kabul while other countries can now engage the Taliban as they retain the option of recognition later on. Moscow’s gamble may ultimately prove worthwhile if its early access translates into lasting influence and security benefits.
For now, however, the evidence suggests that Russia has gained a stronger relationship with the Taliban, but not necessarily the broader diplomatic leadership that many analysts believed recognition was set to produce.
**Giorgio Cafiero is the CEO of Gulf State Analytics. **
Follow him on Twitter: @GiorgioCafiero
Edited by Charlie Hoyle
