Moscow can walk into Kazakhstan and chew gum
at the Ukrainian border with the recent unrest unlikely to upset its tactics
further west.
By Colm Quinn, the
newsletter writer at Foreign Policy.
A frame grab
taken on January 6, 2022 from an AFPTV video made on January 5, 2022, shows
protesters storming in the city hall of Kazakhstan's largest city Almaty as
unprecedented unrest in the Central Asian nation. ALEXANDER
PLATONOV/AFPTV/AFP
JANUARY 7,
2022, 6:27 AM
Here is today’s Foreign Policy brief: Russia
sends troops into Kazakhstan to help quell unrest, Cambodia’s
Prime Minister Hun Sen visits Myanmar, and China to
appoint new Horn of Africa envoy.
Russia’s Troops Head South
Just as Russia prepares for crucial talks with the
United States and NATO over its build-up in Ukraine and demands for security
guarantees, a new crisis has begun in neighboring Kazakhstan, where protests
over the government’s removal of fuel price caps have morphed into a larger
reckoning with the authoritarian state.
With government buildings torched and the main airport
briefly occupied, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev called on the
Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), a regional security partnership
in which Russia is the most powerful member, to provide peacekeeping support.
The move threatens to upend Kazakhstan’s decades-long great power balancing
act.
Russia’s deployment of roughly 2,000 troops isn’t
expected to affect its build-up near Ukraine’s border, despite forces usually
close to Kazakhstan now deployed west. The troop dispatch would be “rather
small, but sufficient to demonstrate the regime has backing from Moscow,”
Michael Kofman, director of the Russia Studies Program at the CNA
Corporation wrote on Twitter.
As well as Russians, military units from Armenia,
Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan will make up a force of some 2,500 troops,
a number not close to an invasion force in the world’s ninth largest country.
It’s likely to be mainly charged with protecting key infrastructure.
And so far, there’s no sign of the protests being added
to the list of Russian grievances ahead of next week’s talks, Olga Oliker, the
program director for Europe and Central Asia at the International Crisis Group,
confirmed via e-mail, with no real evidence of a broad push within Russia to
label the turmoil as a “color revolution” as Moscow has described protests in
Belarus, Georgia, and Ukraine.
What the CSTO entry has done is upset the equilibrium
Kazakhstan has managed to find between East and West. Since its independence
from the Soviet Union it has served in several capacities: As a conduit for
China’s economic ambitions, a key Russian ally as well as a friendly nation for
the United States and European Union. Not anymore, Jennifer Brick
Murtazashvili, a Central Asia expert at the University of Pittsburgh,
told Foreign Policy. “I think it’s a huge blow to
Kazakshtan’s sovereignty, and it really alters the balance of power in the
region,” Brick Murtazashvili said.
The CSTO deployment will also be a test of Tokayev as he
seeks to come out of the shadow of long-time leader Nursultan Nazarbayev. “I’ll
be looking at how the local security forces respond to the Russian troops that
are coming in,” Brick Murtazashvili said. “Are they going to be loyal to
Tokayev? You’re asking them to be loyal to this new person who’s taken over,
and the first thing he does is bring in foreigners.”
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