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Moscow blasts UK media’s ‘fake’ news reports on oil supplies to Taliban

This sort of fake news is aimed at diverting international focus from NATO's brute force policy debacle in Afghanistan, according to the Foreign Ministry

MOSCOW, October 16. /TASS/. UK media reports on Russia supplying oil products to the Taliban are nothing but fake news aimed at diverting the attention of the international community from NATO’s policy fiasco of brute force in Afghanistan, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Monday.

"Officials in Moscow noted the articles in The Times, which other UK media picked up on and circulated later, regarding a new allegation that Russia is bankrolling the Taliban movement (group outlawed in Russia)," the ministry said in a commentary.

"These articles quote some unnamed sources in the Taliban that speculate about Moscow’s objectives in Afghanistan and about the alleged free supplies of Russian petroleum products to the Taliban," it said.

"We think these fake news reports seek to divert the international community’s attention from NATO’s fiasco policy of brute force in Afghanistan and are the result of a jealous reaction towards the stabilization efforts by Moscow and its regional partners, including the SCO, in its Afghan policy," the commentary indicated.

"We would like to make a recommendation to reporters at The Times to focus more attention on the flights of unmarked helicopters to areas controlled by extremists in various governorates of Afghanistan," it said. "The Afghans themselves claim the British secret services are behind those missions."

"Also, it would make sense to focus on the mounting number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan this year, partly because of the international coalition’s reluctance to learn from previous years’ lessons and the continued practice of wagering on military force [of the campaign]," the ministry said.

"We are stressing once again that Russia does not render any assistance to the Taliban movement and consistently pursues a policy of assisting the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and rendering it all-round assistance in becoming a peaceful, independent, stable and economically developed state free from terrorism and drugs," the commentary said.

The ministry said it would upload The Times article in the section of its homepage exposing the publications that contained false information on Russia as fresh samples of disinformation circulated in the Western media