Russia welcomes Biden's pledge that Afghanistan is 'end of era' for US interference abroad, saying world may be quieter in future

Russia's top diplomat has applauded American president Joe Biden's admission that his country's efforts in Afghanistan were misguided and that Washington now needs to refrain from repeating such large-scale foreign interventions.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday that there appeared to be a new-found belief in Western capitals that such attempts to reshape foreign nations in their own image with open-ended military operations were doomed to fail.

In a speech earlier this week in the aftermath of the US withdrawal from Kabul, Biden said that "as we turn the page on the foreign policy that has guided our nation the last two decades, we've got to learn from our mistakes."

"This decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It's about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries," the American president added.

"We welcome such statements," Lavrov said. "We have long called for lessons to be learned from those adventures that our Western colleagues have gotten themselves into in recent decades. I hope these statements are reflective of a hard-won conclusion, and that our planet will be a little quieter in the future."

Moscow's top envoy also pointed to a similar view aired recently by French president Emmanuel Macron, who argued that foreign intervention should only be conducted hand-in-hand with a sovereign nation, rather than in an effort to overturn the government of a country.

"The moment is very interesting," Lavrov said, "both of them, with a gap of just one or two days, announced that it was time to wrap up interference in the internal affairs of other countries with aims to impose Western-style democracy on them."

Russia is engaged in a number of conflicts across the world, but insists that it only deploys troops and military support in response to requests from governments, like that of Bashar Assad in Syria's bloody civil war. Moscow's forces are also undertaking peace-keeping operations along the frontier between Armenia and Azerbaijan, as part of a Kremlin-brokered peace deal signed-up-to by both nations after months of fierce fighting last year.

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