Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
The political elites of Central Asia view the invasion of Ukraine through the prism of their own interests, top of which is the preservation of their own regimes. For this reason, they will continue to show loyalty to Putin.
The Kazakh leadership has achieved its main aim of easing up a little and making space for others while maintaining complete control of parliament.
By continuing to rely on Russia’s ethnic minorities and foreign labor migrants to do its dirty work in Ukraine, the Kremlin is inadvertently damaging ties to its former colonies.
Some speculate that by drawing its southern neighbors into closer cooperation on gas, Russia wants to gain control over Central Asian exports to China. That won’t be easy.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has upended geopolitics in Central Asia, but perhaps nowhere more than in Kazakhstan, where President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has been increasingly emboldened in managing ties with Moscow.
Moscow had every opportunity to make the Central Asian nations gravitate toward it of their own accord. Yet now Russian soft power in Central Asia is dissipating before our eyes.
Concerns and public resentment over the influx of Russians cannot be seen any other way than through the prism of the long colonial history between the Central Asian states and the Russian (and later Soviet) empire.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, the red lines in its relationship with Russia have been unclear for Kazakhstan. If earlier Kazakhstan holding military drills with NATO would not have angered Russia, now Moscow sees itself as being at war with the West and may act much more aggressively.
The war in Ukraine has enabled Kazakhstan’s Tokayev to reinvent himself as a truly independent figure, no longer reliant on either his predecessor Nazarbayev or Russia’s Putin. Now Tokayev hopes to cement this status by securing a popular mandate to rule.
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