US intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan, including from US, the New York Time reported on Friday.
US officials discovered the information about the bounties months ago. Some of the bounty was either collected by militants or armed criminal elements associated with them, NYT reported.
Twenty Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it was not clear which killings were under suspicion.
The militants were offered bounties from Russian forces, NYT reported. The intelligence officials believe the bounties involve Unit 29155, a branch of Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency.
Unit 29155, which is believed to be made up of former Russian special-forces troops, has been blamed for a series of assassination attempts throughout Europe, including the poisoning of Russian defector Sergei Skripal in 2018.
Some officials have theorized that the Russians may be seeking revenge on NATO forces for a2018 battle in Syria in which the American military killed several hundred pro-Syrian forces, including numerous Russian mercenaries, as they advanced on an American outpost.
Officials have also suggested that the Russians may have been trying to derail peace talks to keep the United States bogged down in Afghanistan.
President Donald Trump was briefed of the intelligence assessment, but the White House has yet to respond to it, the report said. The National Security Council had developed plans to address the report as early as March — plans that included making diplomatic complaints or sanctions, according to NYT.
Russia rejected the report.
“Baseless and anonymous accusations [published by nytimes] of Moscow as mastermind behind killing of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan have already led to direct threats to the life of employees of the Russian Embassies in Washington D.C. and London,” the embassy said in a Twitter post.
It said that the authors of the article “obviously lack information on cooperation between Russia and US on the Afghan peace process, on Syrian, North Korean, Venezuelan, Iranian agendas.”
“We demand the relevant US authorities take effective measures to ensure the fulfillment of their international obligations under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961,” the embassy said.
