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The first Taliban ambassador, Molvavi Gul Hasan, delivered his credentials as a representative of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan to the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, during a solemn ceremony in the Grand Kremlin Palace.
This is the first head of the Taliban delegation in Russia after Moscow removed the movement from the list of terrorist organizations.
The Taliban diplomat delivered his credentials to Putin during an event attended by 33 other foreign ambassadors, including several Europeans and Latin Americans.
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The Afghan ambassador arrived in Moscow in the summer of last year, shortly after Russia, the first country in the world to recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, gave its approval to his appointment. Since the Taliban's rise to power in Kabul, their representative in Moscow had been the embassy's chargé d'affaires. The Russian Supreme Court announced in April 2025 its decision to stop considering the Taliban as a terrorist group, a condition it imposed on them in February 2003. This way, that movement was no longer prohibited in Russia, whose government began to build bridges with the Taliban years before they regained power in Kabul in 2021 after the US military withdrawal. In December 2024, Putin enacted a law that allowed the removal of the Taliban and other groups from the list, as long as they renounced supporting, justifying, and propagating terrorism. The Taliban were listed in 2003 on the grounds that they employed terrorist methods and maintained links with illegal armed groups in Chechnya, where Putin had launched the Second Chechen War in 1999. The shift occurred when the Taliban declared war on the Islamic State, after which some of their representatives were invited in 2018 to visit the Russian capital.
