Vladamir Putin has said that the US achieved "zero" in Afghanistan and that its 20-year war resulted in "only tragedies."
The Russian president made the comments at an educational facility in the far east of Russia on Wednesday, September 1, and said the war proved that foreign values can't be foisted onto other nations, per Reuters.
"US forces were present on this territory for 20 years and for 20 years tried... to civilize the people who live there, to instill their own norms and standards of life in the widest possible sense of this word, including when it comes to the political organization of society," he said.
Watch a full news report about Putin's comments below:The US completed its military occupation of Afghanistan on Monday, August 30 ahead of its August 31 deadline to evacuate the country after the 20-year occupation that began in the wake of 9/11.
"The result is only tragedies and losses of life for those who did it, the US, and even more so for those people who live on the territory of Afghanistan. The result is zero, if not a negative one all-round," Putin added.
He went on to say of the Afghan people that "it's not possible to foist anything on them from the outside."
The Soviet Union executed a failed war in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 in a bid to serve their own communist government.
Ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who oversaw the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, described the US's withdrawal from Afghanistan amid the Taliban takeover this month as a "failed enterprise from the start."
"They should have admitted failure earlier," Gorbachev told the Russian state-owned news outlet RIA, according to Reuters. "The important thing now is to draw the lessons from what happened and make sure that similar mistakes are not repeated."
United States' withdrawal from the country has been widely criticized for a number of factors, with a congressman warning that it has now left the Taliban with access to $85 billion worth of American weapons.
Biden himself said that he couldn't see a way to end the US's military occupation without "chaos ensuing".
