President Trump has a pretty cozy relationship with Russia.

He flat out asked the country for help in the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton.

Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.

He defended the country after it went ahead and meddled in the election.

People came to me, Dan Coats came to me, and some others they said they think it's

Russia.

I have President Putin.

He just said it's not Russia.

He even tried to bring Russia into the G7.

Russia should be in this meeting.

Why are we having a meeting without Russia being in the meeting?

But lately it's gotten hard for Trump to defend Russia, especially over the last week.

There is good reason to believe that the Russian government paid the Taliban to kill American soldiers.

Zach Beechim has been covering the story for Vox.

Well, it's tantamount to an act of war from one nuclear-armed power against another one.

Not that they're likely to escalate to major war, but it's a sign that Russian foreign policies

become so antagonistic towards the United States that they're willing to outright kill American soldiers,

even though the two countries are nominally in sort of a time of peace and cooperation.

Okay, so let's start at the beginning here.

Walk us through what we know that the Russians are alleged to have been doing in Afghanistan and when.

The first report that we've heard of that in March 2019,

the US government got some early murky intelligence that the Russians may have been doing this.

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