[16] Security officials from the United States and Afghanistan have previously determined that Russia provides financial support and arms to the Taliban and its leaders.
[1][2] Reports from Afghanistan-based U.S. Special Operations forces and intelligence officers that militants had been paid bounties in 2019 for their targeting of U.S. military personnel were raised in 2019 and 2020.
Afghan officials said that several businessmen who transferred money through the hawala system were suspected of being intermediaries for the bounty program and were arrested in raids.
[33][32] According to the New York Times, U.S. intelligence identified Azizi as a key middleman, collecting multiple cash payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars from Russia and distributing them to Taliban-linked militants.
[17] Investigators focused on two attacks on U.S. troops, one of which was a bombing outside Bagram Airfield in April 2019 that killed Marines Robert A. Hendriks, Benjamin S. Hines, and Christopher Slutman.
[33] The existence of a Russian bounty program would mark an escalation of the ongoing Second Cold War and the first time GRU is known to have orchestrated attacks on Western military personnel.
[3] According to a New York Times report in July 2020, the Trump administration had sought to foster doubts about the existence of a Russian bounty program.
[35] A separate Wall Street Journal report said that the NSA has "strongly dissented" from the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency assessments that the bounty plot is credible and real.
The bounty reports were included in the review, along with other issues (such as the poisoning and imprisonment of Alexei Navalny, Russian efforts to interfere with the U.S. elections, and the SolarWinds cyberespionage attack).
[40] A spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) said in an April 2021 statement that the United States Intelligence Community had "low to moderate confidence" in the existence of the Russian bounty program.
[41][7][43] Citing unnamed sources, on June 26, 2020, The New York Times reported on a Russian military program to pay bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing American soldiers in Afghanistan.
[16] The Washington Post reported that "Several people familiar with the matter said it was unclear exactly how many Americans or coalition troops from other countries may have been killed or targeted under the program" and that the intelligence, obtained from U.S. military interrogations of captured Taliban-linked militants, had been "passed up from the U.S. Special Operations forces based in Afghanistan and led to a restricted high-level White House meeting" in late March 2020.
[16] The Times reported that American investigators had identified at least one attack they suspected of being thus incentivized: a car bombing on April 8, 2019 outside of Bagram Airfield which killed three Marines and wounded three more, as well as injuring at least six Afghani citizens.
[4] On July 9, 2020, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said that Marine Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr. and DOD intelligence agencies have not found a link between alleged Russian bounties and that specific attack.
[44] Russia has denied that the bounty program exists,[16] issuing denials through Putin's spokesperson Dmitry Peskov,[45] Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev,[46] Russia's envoy to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov,[45] and Russian lawmaker Frants Klintsevich, a member of Federation Council's defense and security committee.
"[47] Some Russian experts said that "U.S. intelligence about Russia has become completely detached from reality" and that the reports about bounties "serves only to fuel ... a political civil war between President Donald Trump and his opponents in Washington"; Andrei Kortunovru [ru], director of the Russian International Affairs Council, which is affiliated with the Foreign Ministry, said that making payments to the Taliban would harm Russia's interests by hastening a U.S. retreat from the region and increasing the threat of extreme Islamist forces coming to power in Afghanistan, creating instability and insurrection in the former Soviet states of central Asia.
[50] When Russia realized that the US intended leaving Afghanistan, it began working to help the moderate, nationalist factions of the Taliban prevail over the more radical wings.
[3] The U.S. Intelligence Community's assessment led to an interagency meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) at the Trump White House in late March 2020.
[3] While U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad advocated for directly confronting Russia, officials with the NSC were "more dismissive of taking immediate action".
[51] Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said that Trump had not received a briefing on the bounty program.
[16] Trump called the bounty program "Fake News" and a hoax,[16][52] and wrote on Twitter that U.S. intelligence advised him that it had not reported the matter to him or Mike Pence as it did not find the information credible.
[4] Current and former intelligence officials said that even during in-person meetings, Trump "is particularly difficult to brief on national security matters" and "often relies instead on conservative media and friends for information.
[4] White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said that people would "go to jail" over the reports that allege Russia offered bounties to Taliban fighters.
"[5] In September 2020, McKenzie said that the existence of a Russian bounty "has not been proved to a level of certainty that satisfies me" but that the military continued to seek evidence and considered the matter "not a closed issue.
[59] Trump never raised the bounty allegations in his conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin,[51][43] prompting criticism from Democrats and some Republicans.
[63] On July 1, 2020, the House Armed Services Committee overwhelmingly voted in favor of an amendment to restrict Trump's ability to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
"[67][68] On January 25, 2021, four days after Biden had taken office as president and begun receiving more detailed intelligence briefings, he modulated his comments, referring to "reports of bounties.
[68] The document said: "The administration is responding to the reports that Russia encouraged Taliban attacks against U.S. and coalition personnel in Afghanistan based on the best assessments from the Intelligence Community.
Even at the height of the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the United States refrained from such activity, despite engaging enthusiastically in proxy warfare in theaters around the world.
[75] The alleged Iran-Taliban ties were cited as part of the justification for the assassination of Qasem Soleimani by the U.S..[76] Separately, there have been uncorroborated reports that the Chinese government offered bounties to pay for attacks on U.S. troops in Afghanistan.