NATO

Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov made the remarks during his daily briefing on Friday after NATO Defence Ministers agreed on a new master plan a day earlier to defend against Russian threats on multiple fronts, reports Xinhua news agency. The Kremlin said that the new plan of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to deter Russia fully justifies Moscow's decision to end all official dialogue with the alliance.

"While the participation of both China and Russia and other Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) countries is important, those countries that were fighting there (in Afghanistan) for 20 years bear primary responsibility for what is happening there," Xinhua news agency quoted Putin as saying at the plenary session of the 18th annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi on Thursday.

Addressing a press conference ahead of a two-day meeting of NATO Defence Ministers, Stoltenberg said NATO regretted Russia's decision "which does not promote dialogue and mutual understanding", reports Xinhua news agency. He added that NATO's policy remained consistent, and it remained "open to dialogue, including through the NATO Russia Council".

"NATO's reluctance to interact has become obvious, and this seems to be definitive and irrevocable. We will proceed from this when developing response measures, which will follow," said Russia Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova during her weekly press briefing. She added that while the alliance's decision did not come as a surprise, it was nonetheless an arrogant and hypocritical move, especially as no official explanations were provided.

Stoltenberg said the US and NATO are not responsible for the collapse of the former government, TOLO News reported on Sunday."Parts of the Afghan security forces fought bravely. But they were unable to secure the country. Because ultimately, the Afghan political leadership failed to stand up to the Taliban and to achieve the peaceful solution that Afghans desperately wanted.

British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace told Sky News: "We will process those people that we have brought with us, the 1,000 people approximately inside the airfield now. And we will seek a way to continue to find a few people in the crowd, where we can, but overall the main processing has now closed and we have a matter of hours."

The document prepared by the RHIPTO Norwegian Center for Global Analyses, which provides intelligence to the UN, states that Taliban militants have been going door-to-door to find targets and threatening their family members, the BBC has revealed."It is in writing that, unless they give themselves in, the Taliban will arrest and prosecute, interrogate and punish family members on behalf of those individuals."

"I am in touch with locals of Herat city who worked with me. There is a curfew kind of atmosphere in the entire city. People are not coming out of their houses," he told IANS. Only the Kabul airport is operating and all the others are closed. "When we were evacuated, there was no mad rush like it is happening in Kabul. Our base was handed over to the local government after evacuation," he says.

"The big question we have to ask and understand in a clear-eyed way is: why didn't the forces we trained, and equipped, and supported over so many years, why were they not able to stand up against the Taliban in a stronger and better way than they did?" Stoltenberg said at a press conference after a special meeting of NATO ambassadors to discuss the situation in Afghanistan.

"The recent NATO summit demonstrated unprecedented anti-Russian sentiment and confirmed the alliance's desire to occupy the role of the world's police," Patrushev said at the ninth Moscow Conference on International Security on Thursday. He pointed to the bloc's increased military spending that went up by 4 per cent in 2020 despite a global economic decline.