Russia Denies Paying Bounties, but Some Say the U.S. Had It Coming

MOSCOW — Three years into a grinding war in eastern Ukraine, the Trump administration, in a sharp break with Obama-era policy, proposed providing the Ukrainian army with potent American weapons, Javelin anti-tank missiles, to aid its struggle with Russian-backed separatists.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia responded with an ominous warning, saying weapons in the separatist regions could easily be sent “to other zones of conflict” — which many took to mean Afghanistan.

Russia’s grievances against what it sees as American bullying and expansion into its own zones of influence have been stacking up for decades, starting with the C.I.A.’s role in arming mujahedin fighters who, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, delivered a fatal blow not only to the invading Red Army but the entire Soviet Union.

A deep well of bitterness created by past and current conflicts in Afghanistan, Ukraine and more recently Syria, where U.S. forces killed scores of Russian mercenaries in 2018, help explain why Russia, according to U.S. intelligence officials, has become so closely entangled with the Taliban. In Ukraine, the Trump administration did send Javelins but with the stipulation that they not be used in the war.

Russian officials and commentators reacted with fury to a report last week in The New York Times that American intelligence officials had concluded that Russia’s military intelligence agency had gone so far as to pay bounties to the Taliban and criminal elements linked to it to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan.

Intercepted electronic data showed large financial transfers from Russia’s military intelligence agency, known as the G.R.U., to a Taliban-linked account, according to American officials. Officials also identified an Afghan contractor as a key middleman between the G.R.U. and militants linked to the Taliban who carried out the attacks.

Russian officials have scoffed at the idea they would hire killers from a radical Islamist group that is banned in Russia as a “terrorist” outfit and that shares many views of the Afghan fighters who killed so many Red Army soldiers, and those of Islamic militants who caused Moscow so much pain in Chechnya during two wars there.

In remarks to a state news agency on Monday, Zamir Kabulov, Mr. Putin’s special envoy for Afghanistan and a former ambassador in Kabul, dismissed the Taliban bounties report as “outright lies” generated by “forces in the United States who don’t want to leave Afghanistan and want to justify their own failures.”

Amid a torrent of outraged denials, however, there have been pointed reminders that, in Russia’s view, the United States, because of its overreach overseas, deserves to taste some of its own medicine.

Speaking during a talk show on state television dominated by conspiracy theories about plots by President Trump’s Democratic rivals,…