Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
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.
All eyes will be on the China-Russia strategic partnership, but the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s Central Asian members have greater confidence and bargaining power than ever before—and Beijing knows it.
What kind of country would Kazakhstan or Ukraine be if, back then, they had tried to push their way into the nuclear club?
A social media post by former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev warning that northern Kazakhstan could be next in line after Ukraine was quickly taken down, but it reflects the mindset of Russian hawks and is entirely in keeping with Russian political dialogue, where few taboos remain.
The nuclear testing component left a devastating legacy in Kazakhstan because for 40 years the military tested nuclear weapons, both in the atmosphere and later underground.
All the crises that have erupted in Central Asia this year have the same underlying causes: weak political institutions, and governments that dismiss public frustration until it erupts into bloodshed on the streets.
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