The Taliban administration\u2019s Ministry of Defence said a delegation led by Nasibullah Madani, commander of the Abdullah bin Masoud Joint Training Centre, took part in the strategic military exercise \u201cCenter-2026\u201d in Russia. The ministry did not provide details on the purpose or outcome of the delegation\u2019s participation in the drills.<\/p>\n
According to the ministry, members of the delegation observed the conduct of the exercise and visited an exhibition of weapons and military equipment, including heavy weapons, drones, long-range missiles and robotic systems. The Taliban delegation also held talks on the sidelines of the event with military representatives from Russia, China, India, North Korea, Vietnam, Colombia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The discussions were described as focusing on bilateral relations, exchange of experience, professional training and joint cooperation.<\/p>\n
The delegation\u2019s presence comes as Russia has, in recent years, created space for expanded formal contacts with the Taliban administration. Moscow has removed the Taliban from its list of terrorist and banned organisations and has handed over management of the Afghan embassy in Russia to a representative of the administration.<\/p>\n
Taliban delegations have also in recent years taken part in Russia-hosted meetings, including the St Petersburg International Economic Forum and the Kazan economic forum. Moscow has also held \u201cMoscow Format\u201d meetings with representatives of regional countries, where topics including regional security and Kabul\u2019s relations with regional capitals are discussed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Taliban military delegation took part in Russia’s Center-2026 drill and held talks with military representatives from several countries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23151,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-important-news","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23152\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}