Russia calls on US to release Afghan reserves

Zamir Kabulov

Russia on Monday called on the United States to release Afghan central bank reserves that Washington blocked after the Taliban's takeover of Kabul earlier this month. "If our Western colleagues are actually worried about the fate of the Afghan people, then we must not create additional problems for them by freezing gold and foreign exchange reserves," said the Kremlin's envoy to Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov. The United States must urgently unfreeze these assets, he said on the state-run Rossiya 24 network, "to bolster the rate of the collapsing national currency". Kabulov added that without doing so the new Afghan authorities will turn to "the trafficking of illegal opiates" and "sell on the black market the weapons" abandoned by the Afghan army and the United States.