25 years ago, the almost 10-year long deployment of the limited contingent of Soviet forces in Afghanistan drew to a close. Experts have since been at variance about the assessment of the Afghan campaign, but they invariably agree that it was the biggest-scale (and actually quite ambiguous, obviously for that reason) foreign policy action throughout the post-war history of the Soviet Union.
The last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan on February
15th 1989 as part of the Soviet 40th Army, which was the backbone of the
limited contingent. The Soviet troops withdrew under the command of the
40th Army legendary commander, Lieutenant-General Boris Gromov. He
managed to brilliantly carry out the withdrawal, with the US now trying
to use his experience to more or less decently pull out of Afghanistan
following the more than 20 years of actually useless occupation of that
country. This is what an expert with the Centre for Modern Afghan
Studies, Nikita Mendkovich, says about it in a comment.
