The world cares what Russia you do in your gardens, no matter what you do in your backyard. What Russia considers her gardens give to Europe, they look towards the West and are the only thing that the Western powers seem to care about russian hinterland; that zone of influence Moscow try to keep at all costs.
In the backyard is the Caucasus and the Central Asian countries that, like the gardens, made up the Soviet Union. And there the Kremlin acts without anyone in the world expressing indignation. He just showed it on Kazakhstanwhere the Russian army entered to collaborate with the brutal repression that crushed massive popular protests, leaving almost 300 dead, thousands imprisoned and dozens missing.
Ukraine, Belarus and the little one moldova they are the gardens of Russia. He tightly controls Belarus through the dictator Alexander Lukashenko. He made the Moldovans pay for their independence by supporting the secession of Transnistria, which became in fact, although without international recognition, a separate republic, with Russian soldiers guarding it.
Ukraine is the most precious part for what Russia Consider your garden. She is not willing to accept that Western powers come to her borders by incorporating Ukraine into NATO. her message to Kyiv is that, if it enlists in the Atlantic alliance, it will lose territories in the same way that Moldova lost the lands east of the Dniester River. Specifically, Ukraine it will lose the Russian-speaking eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, which are already self-ruled by pro-Russian separatists.
The maximum goal you have Vladimir Putin is that Ukraine agrees to peacefully join Russia. An annexation by absorption, like the one that reunified Germany by making the GDR disappear within the FRG. The intermediate goal is to annex its eastern half in the same way that it has already annexed Crimea. And the minimum goal is that NATO agrees to resign officially to do what it has already done with the Warsaw Pact countries and with the three Baltic republics: incorporate them into its structure.
As at the moment he cannot advance in the first or the last, he keeps the second standing. And to intimidate the Atlantic alliance, Putin threatened to deploy military forces in Cuba and Venezuelawhich reconfirms their control over the regimes in Havana and Caracas.
Western powers follow all the Putin’s moves in what Russia considers its garden, while the head of the Kremlin shows off his might in his backyard sending troops to Kazakhstan.
Was that Central Asian country being attacked by another country? No. What was happening was a gigantic wave of protests that broke out when the Kazakh government established a disproportionate increase in gas price.
Putin sent Russian military forces, while activating the TCollective Security Agreement, which make up Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. The objective of the joint military action was to defend the Kazakh regime, whose president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, ordered his repressive forces to shoot to kill against the demonstrators.
By the way, the protests generated by the increase in fuels were extremely violent and both the arson attacks on government buildings and the beheading of two policemen prove that ultra-islamist groups they had infiltrated some street demonstrations.
If the United States had sent troops to Chile to quell the 2019 protests or to Colombia against the 2021 protests, the world would have seen, and rightly so, an unacceptable and brutal act of imperialist interference. That same is the sending russian troops to Kazakhstan arguing an external attack by ultra-Islamism with the support of the West in its desire to destabilize the periphery of Russia. Putin sent military forces to collaborate with the repression in another country. And the one that Tokayev was executing was a criminal repression.
It’s not the first time the Kremlin sends tanks to clean up its backyard. He had already intervened in conflicts to bring Caucasian regions such as Ossetia and Abkhazia under control. But now he exported repression. Why did you go to that extreme?
The answer has several aspects. The geopolitical consideration that everything that was Soviet territory should continue to be a zone of Russian influence, a point at which Kazakhstan is very important because of its size (it is the ninth largest country in the world), because of 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 imposed by Putin in Russia.
The similarity of the regime makes the Kremlin fear that, if the protests turn 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 current president is a puppet of the despot who in 1990 came to the leadership of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, in whose territory the USSR had the bulk of its nuclear arsenals. And ever since the Soviet Union disappeared, Nazarbayev was the president of the newly independent state, to which he implanted a Enlightened Despotism with accentuated personalistic cult.
Nazarbayev founded Nur Otanwhich in the local language means Radiant Homeland and it is the party that monopolized control of the Kazakh state. 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 which, years later, he renamed, renaming it with his own Christian name: Nur-Sultan.
Although it is impossible that in all the re-elections he has reached almost one hundred percent of the votes According to the polls, the Kazakhs put up with the autocrat. The strict control of society through the 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 slowed down in 2015. Growing dissatisfaction prompted Nazarbayev to resign from the presidency in 2019. But he remained the master of power. That despotic power saved the Russian troops from the wave of protests with which the year 2022 began.
Russia acted in Kazakhstan as the USSR it acted in Czechoslovakia by crushing the Prague Spring in 1968. But the Western powers are not looking into the backyard. They only have eyes to watch what Putin does in his garden.
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