Soviet Forces Complete Withdrawal From Afghanistan

Date

1989

Category

Military & conflict

Region

Middle East (Afghanistan)

Era

Contemporary

Significance

The last Soviet troops crossed the Friendship Bridge out of Afghanistan on 15 February 1989, ending a nine-year military occupation that had become the Soviet Union's costly and demoralising equivalent of a quagmire.

The withdrawal, negotiated under the 1988 Geneva Accords and driven by Mikhail Gorbachev's determination to extract his country from an unwinnable war, followed a conflict that killed some 15,000 Soviet soldiers and well over a million Afghans while displacing millions more as refugees into Pakistan and Iran. The mujahideen insurgency, armed by the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan with weapons including Stinger missiles, had bled the Red Army without ever defeating it outright. The Soviet exit dealt a heavy blow to Moscow's prestige and morale as the Cold War wound down, contributing to the strains that would soon unravel the USSR itself. In Afghanistan it left behind a Soviet-backed government that survived until 1992 and a fractured, heavily armed landscape that descended into civil war, eventually giving rise to the Taliban. The retreat marked the end of a defining Cold War proxy conflict.

Empires active in 1989

• Soviet Union
  1922 CE – 1991 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE
• Yugoslavia
  1918 CE – 1992 CE

Related military & conflict events

• The Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi
  7 April – 19 July 1994
• The September 11 attacks
  11 September 2001
• Fall of Saigon and reunification of Vietnam
  30 April 1975 (reunified 1976)
• Khmer Rouge Seize Cambodia and Declare Year Zero
  1975
• Cuban Missile Crisis
  16–28 October 1962
• Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine
  24 February 2022

Further reading

Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present

The wider story

Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present

Christopher I. Beckwith

Bold single-volume history placing the steppe and Silk Road at the center of Eurasia.

Get it on Amazon →

As an Amazon Associate, Human Saga earns from qualifying purchases.