NYT: US intercepts GRU money transfer to Taliban, allegedly for killing US troops in Afghanistan

US authorities have intercepted data on a bank transfer made from a Russian GRU account to an account linked to the Taliban movement, The New York Times reported, citing three anonymous sources.

The publication calls this one of the pieces of evidence that Russian military intelligence secretly offered Taliban-linked militants bounties for killing international coalition troops in Afghanistan, including the United States.

The intercepted data corroborates the testimony of businessmen arrested in Afghanistan who are suspected of acting as intermediaries between the GRU and the Taliban, the NYT points out. The newspaper notes that this data should reduce disagreements between various US intelligence agencies.

According to The Wall Street Journal, there are such disagreements between the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the CIA. The NSA strongly disagrees that Russia paid for the killing of soldiers in Afghanistan.

According to the NYT, the investigation is focused on two incidents in Afghanistan that resulted in the deaths of American troops. Details of one of them are known so far: in April 2019, an explosion occurred near the Bagram air base, killing three Marines.

• The New York Times was the first to report on June 26 that a Russian GRU unit may have offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to kill international coalition troops in Afghanistan.
• Russian officials called it a lie and said that after the publication of the newspaper, Russian diplomats in Washington and London began receiving direct threats. The Taliban also denied the newspaper's information.
• US President Donald Trump said he had not been informed of Russian attacks on US troops in Afghanistan. According to the NYT, this is not true – the president learned about it back in February.