The Kremlin has just shown its priorities in Central Asia. In contrast to sending troops to Kazakhstan, when the Turkish-backed Azeri army launched itself into the Armenian territories of Nagorno-Karabakh, Russia only reacted when the attackers had conquered Shushi, the second city of the Armenian enclave a few kilometers from Stepanakert, the capital.
Azerbaijan is not a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, of which Armenia is a member along with Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. But Moscow did not activate that mutual defense treaty to help the Armenians. For Vladimir Putin, the obligation to defend Armenia does not include the enclave that came under Azeri control in the Soviet era. The fact is that the defensive pact left the Armenians of Artzakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) to their own devices in the face of a crushing military offensive instigated from Ankara.
In the antipodes of that passivity that allowed Recep Erdogan to extend his influence in the South Caucasus, the mutual defense treaty was activated by the Kremlin to intervene in Kazakhstan. Was it being attacked by a country that is not even part of the defensive pact? No. What was happening was a gigantic wave of protests that broke out when the Kazakh government established a disproportionate increase in the price of gas.
Vladimir Putin sent Russian military forces, while demanding the other countries of the defensive pact to do the same, to defend the despotic regime that reigns in Kazakhstan, whose president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, ordered his repressive forces to shoot to kill against the protesters.
By the way, the protests that triggered the increase in fuel prices were extremely violent and both the arson attacks on government buildings and the beheading of two policemen prove that ultra-Islamist groups had infiltrated the street protests.
If the United States had sent troops to Chile to quell the protests in 2019 or to Colombia against the demonstrations in 2021, the world would have seen, and rightly so, an unacceptable and brutal act of imperialist interference. The same must be seen in the sending of Russian troops to Kazakhstan. Vladimir Putin sent military forces to collaborate with the repression in another country. And the one that Tokayev was executing was a criminal repression.
Although he had already intervened in conflicts to bring Caucasian regions such as Ossetia and Abkhazia under the control of the Kremlin, it is appropriate to ask how the Russian leader could go so far as to export repression. And the answer has several aspects. The geopolitical consideration that everything that was Soviet territory should continue to be a zone of Russian influence.
At this point, Kazakhstan is of great importance due to its size (it is the ninth largest country in the world), due to its wealth in hydrocarbons and minerals; because it is located between Russia and the Chinese province of Xinjiang, being for China a key supplier of minerals and hydrocarbons, and because its autocratic regime with a democratic façade is similar to the one that Putin imposed in Russia, therefore, if the protests overturn a Central Asian autocrat , could generate a domino effect that reaches Moscow. The true owner of power in Kazakhstan is not President Tokayev, but the one who imposed him in office: Nursultan Nazarbayev.
The despot who constitutes the power behind the throne, began to rise in the Soviet nomenclature in the 1980s. In 1990 he became the leader of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, which possessed in its territory the bulk of the nuclear arsenals of the USSR. And when the communist mega-state disappeared in 1991, he installed himself in the presidency of the newly independent country, beginning the construction of an enlightened despotism with a strong personalistic cult.
Nazarbayev created Nur Otan, which in the local language means Radiant Homeland and is the party that took over the Kazakh state, which he governed for almost three decades with absolute powers. The capital, Almaty, as well as the other cities, were filled with statues of the leading megalomaniac. He then established the capital in Astana, a city to which, years later, he changed the name, renaming it with his own Christian name: Nur-Sultan.
Although it is impossible that in all the reelections he has reached almost one hundred percent of the votes that the ballots said, the Kazakhs resignedly endured the despot. The strict control of society through repression and intelligence services is one of the reasons for so much submission. The other is that the economy was doing well. The discontent began when the economy stalled in 2015. Growing dissatisfaction made Nazarbayev resign from the presidency in 2019. But he remained the master of power. That despotic power that the Russian troops have just saved.
