The award-winning former BBC correspondent David Loyn looks at Russia’s dilemmas in Afghanistan as it attempts to fill the vacuum left by America’s withdrawal.

David Loyn interviewing General Joe Dunford for the BBC in Kunduz on June 12, 2013.

Russia’s early support for the Taliban takeover has been replaced with unease, as the Taliban have not formed an inclusive government and appear willing to host international jihadi fighters. While the Afghan state collapses into an unprecedented refugee crisis and famine, is Russia courting disaster in its attempt to grasp an abandoned sphere of influence?

David Loyn on the Afghan-Pakistan frontier.

David Loyn is an author and Visiting Senior Fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London. He has reported on Afghanistan since the mid-1990s and worked for a year in Kabul in 2017 as a Strategic Communications adviser in President Ghani’s office. He is the author of several books, including Butcher and Bolt, a history of foreign intervention in Afghanistan, which looked in detail at the Soviet invasion of 1979 alongside the British wars of the nineteenth century. His latest book is The Long War – the Inside Story of America and Afghanistan since 9/11.

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