KABUL: Taliban leaders announced on Wednesday that Afghanistan and Russia had reached an agreement to purchase millions of tonnes of wheat and petroleum goods.
Due to harsh Western sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has been forced to increase exports to Asian nations in order to support its economy. According to Abdul Salam Jawad, the ministry’s spokesman, “the contract was agreed upon last month when the minister of industry and trade visited Russia.”
He declined to provide any financial information. According to Jawad, the agreement calls for delivering two million tonnes of wheat, 500,000 tonnes of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), one million tonnes of LPG, one million tonnes of fuel, and one million tonnes of gasoline to Kabul.
The Russian supplies are anticipated to arrive “in the next several weeks,” according to a second statement from the ministry of economics. The Taliban and Moscow reached “preliminary agreements,” according to Moscow.
Russia’s special representative to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, was quoted by the Russian state news agency TASS as saying that “now they (the two sides) have to sign actual agreements on volumes and list of products.”
Since the Taliban took back control of Afghanistan after the hurried withdrawal of US-led foreign forces in August of last year, the country’s economic crisis has only become worse. Following the freezing of $7 billion in Afghan assets held in American banks by Washington, the nation’s banking system came dangerously close to disintegrating.
