MOSCOW, May 27. /TASS/. The Taliban (banned in Russia) can be removed from the Russian list of terrorist organizations only if the country’s Supreme Court rules so, lawyer Dmitry Agranovsky said.
"Russian practice to my memory does not know any precedents of removing the status of a terrorist organization, and the law does not give direct instructions on the possibility of resolving this conflict, but we can draw upon Federal Law 115 ("On Combating the Legalization (Laundering) of Proceeds of Crime and the Financing of Terrorism"), which says that the Russian Federal Financial Monitoring Service should remove an organization from the list of terrorist organizations in the event of that a court rules to do so. In our case, given that the Taliban was designated as a terrorist organization following a lawsuit filed by the Prosecutor General's Office in the Supreme Court, the cancellation of this decision is possible following a new lawsuit filed by the same agency in the same court on account of newly discovered circumstances," the lawyer told TASS.
The Russian Foreign Ministry and the Justice Ministry earlier advised Russian President Vladimir Putin that the Taliban could be removed from the list of banned organizations, Zamir Kabulov, director of the Russian Foreign Ministry's Second Asia Department, told TASS. He said that the recommendation had been endorsed by other government agencies.
After the US announced in the spring of 2021 its decision to withdraw its armed forces from Afghanistan, the Taliban started a large-scale operation to take control of the country. On August 15, then-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country and Taliban forces entered Kabul. All US troops had left Afghanistan by the start of September.