Tag Archives: Soviet War

We Asked Russia’s 1980s Afghan War Vets To Judge The U.S. Exit. Here’s What They Said

Source: NPR

MOSCOW — It’s been more than a month since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Sergei Opalev is still trying to wrap his head around the chaotic end to America’s 20-year war.

It’s not the defeat that confounds him — he understands that part all too well. Opalev served as a captain in the Soviet armyas it was gradually humbled by Afghan mujahedeen fighters during a decade of war in the 1980s.

The problem, he says, is how U.S. forces left.

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