We Asked Russia's 1980s Afghan War Vets To Judge The U.S. Exit. Here's What They Said

MOSCOW — It's been more than a month since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Sergei Opalev is still trying to wrap his head around the chaotic end to America's 20-year war.

It's not the defeat that confounds him — he understands that part all too well. Opalev served as a captain in the Soviet army as it was gradually humbled by Afghan mujahedeen fighters during a decade of war in the 1980s.

The problem, he says, is how U.S. forces left.

"It's just a fact that if you want to evacuate a division, you need a week," says Opalev, who was among the last Soviet soldiers to withdraw from Afghanistan. "If you pull out an army of tens of thousands, you need a year."

As the United States grapples with the fallout from its exit from Afghanistan, former soldiers who fought as part of the USSR's own losing military campaign see echoes in their experiences — similar searing loss — but also evidence of American miscalculation that casts the Soviet experience in a more flattering light.

Moreover, perceptions of missteps in the U.S. withdrawal have played into the hands of Russian President Vladimir Putin's wider