Iran Press/ Commentary: Following the meeting with Victoria Nuland, Sergey Ryabkov said: "We emphasized the unacceptability of a US military presence in Central Asian countries in any form whatever."
The Wall Street Journal said earlier, referring to its sources, that Russia and the US had allegedly discussed the possibility of the US military using Russian bases in Central Asia.
Central Asia is a region in Asia that stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to China and Mongolia in the east, and from Afghanistan and Iran in the south to Russia in the north, including the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
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The US had established temporary bases in Uzbekistan, which closed in 2005, and Kyrgyzstan, which closed in 2014, when foreign troops initially invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and toppled five years of Taliban rule, aided in part by the buy-in from Russia and China in support of the US and NATO mission.
Now the Taliban have regained power in Afghanistan, and the United States intends to establish a foothold in a Central Asian country bordering Afghanistan after leaving Afghanistan. The request is opposed by Russia and is likely to be opposed by China.
Twenty years later, both Russia and China have diverged from US strategy towards Afghanistan, forging ahead with an approach that does not include having a US presence in their back yard, Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, a Central Asia expert at the University of Pittsburg, told Al Jazeera.
"You could say Russia allowed the US to host military bases in Central Asia," Murtazashvili said. "As the war went on, Russia and China got frustrated that this effort to fight terrorism was not necessarily working."
It was not so long that the United States had military bases in the region, but now much depends on whether the advantages would outweigh the inevitable losses that Central Asian countries would sustain as a result of Moscow and Beijing's displeasure, Temur Umarov wrote in Carnegie Moscow center.
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