Russia is going to invite representatives of the Taliban to international talks on Afghanistan that it plans to host in Moscow on Oct. 20, official said on Thursday.
President Vladimir Putin's special representative on Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, said the group would be invited to negotiations involving China, India, Iran and Pakistan.
The talks will follow a G20 summit on Afghanistan on October 12 that will seek to help the country avoid a humanitarian catastrophe in the wake of the Taliban takeover.
Kabulov affirmed that Russia would deliver the promised aid, but the details were still being decided.
"This is being worked out," he told journalists, saying "cargo" was being collected.
Moscow has moved to engage with the Taliban but stopped short of recognition of the group, which is banned as a terrorist organisation in Russia.
On Monday, Kabulov said Moscow would not "exclude" revising the UN sanctions regime against the Taliban.
"But at this stage we believe it is not expedient to rush," he said.
On his part, Putin has said the Afghan government formed by the Taliban is not representative and inclusive, but it is essential to work with it.
“The Taliban movement, having actually become the country’s sole master, formed its government, which assumed responsibility for Afghanistan’s future,” Putin stated at a joint meeting of the leaders of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
“This is an interim government, as the Taliban themselves say, and it cannot be really called representative or inclusive,” Putin mentioned, adding that there are no members of other ethnic groups in it.
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