Commentary on Political Economy

Friday 7 January 2022

 Putin can’t afford crises in both Kazakhstan and Ukraine





Russian paratroopers board a military cargo plane to depart to Kazakhstan as a peacekeeping force at the Chkalovsky airport, outside Moscow, in this image released Jan. 6. (Handout/AFP/Getty Images)
Opinion by Josh Rogin
January 7 at 7:32 am Taiwan Time
Even though the Kazakhstan government shut down that country’s Internet, shocking news continues to emerge of the violent protests there that have prompted harsh police retaliation nationwide. That, in turn, has resulted in dozens killed, government buildings aflame, a survival struggle for the ruling regime and a fresh crisis for that regime’s main benefactor, Russian President Vladimir Putin. The West should use Putin’s new problem to dissuade him from recklessly starting another crisis in Ukraine.
To be sure, Putin has long preached about reasserting Russian control over all the former Soviet territories, including Kazakhstan. Putin has said the country was artificially invented by former prime minister and president Nursultan Nazarbayev, who founded and ruled it for more than three decades as a thinly veiled dictatorship, mimicking Putin’s own model. Though still pulling strings behind the scenes, the now-81-year-old Nazarbayev has clearly lost control of the situation, forcing him to run to Putin for emergency help.
For the first time, the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) has deployed troops inside Kazakhstan, supposedly at Kazakhstan’s request, to fight regular citizens the government now calls “terrorists.” It’s still early, and much is unknown, but there’s a real risk that the Kazakhstan crisis could turn into a quagmire Russia wasn’t planning for.
“This is an unprecedented and an unimaginable scenario, where the government that prided itself as being strong and stable would appeal to this Russian-led organization to intervene, when this organization has never done anything like this before,” said Erica Marat, associate professor at the College of International Security Affairs of the National Defense University. “This is basically Kazakhstan surrendering its sovereignty to a Russian-led military force. … It’s beyond anyone’s imagination.”
Marat cautions that the causes of the Kazakhstan crisis are domestic, rooted in decades of social inequality, corruption, poverty and the government’s failure to honor its original promise of a more inclusive and diverse political system. It’s not really about Putin. It’s about socio-economic issues and the broken social contract between the people and the regime.
But now that Putin and Nazarbayev have turned the Kazakhstan domestic crisis into a geopolitical event, it’s impossible to ignore the implications for U.S.-Russia relations, which are reaching a tipping point over Ukraine. Putin’s amassing of 100,000 Russian troops on Ukraine’s border was meant to force the West into negotiations over Moscow’s unreasonable demands, such as NATO retreating to its 1997 borders. As far as that goes, it worked. Top U.S. officials are headed into a series of meetings with Russian officials next week.

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