Vladimir Putin was already engaged in a high-risk operation in Ukraine, with a massive deployment of troops and negotiations planned in the coming days with the United States and NATO. But now another crisis has erupted on its doorstep: on January 6, Russia had to send three thousand paratroopers to Kazakhstan to help a friendly regime save itself from a popular uprising.
This means that Putin is simultaneously engaged on two “fronts”, at the risk of finding himself weakened precisely when he tries to obtain from Westerners what he defines “security guarantees”, and which in practice consist in the recognition of an area of influence of Russia. The Russian president thought he was in a position of strength, but suddenly seems to be at the center of a region whose instability could one day also involve Russia.
Events in Kazakhstan remind us that the former Soviet world is always in a state of excitement. In the summer of 2020 it was the turn of Belarus, with the presidential elections altered by the dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko and the protests that lasted months and repressed by Putin to save the regime. Then there was the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, in which Russia once again had to send its troops to separate the belligerents. Now it is Kazakhstan’s turn.
The external enemy
To justify the use of the Russian-led regional military alliance, the president of Kazakhstan spoke of “terrorist aggression” of foreign inspiration. Moscow also brought up influences from abroad, even citing George Soros, the American philanthropist hated by autocrats. Of course, no one has presented the slightest evidence to support foreign involvement in the revolt, which has lasted for five days and has already resulted in dozens of deaths.
The “foreign hand” looks a lot like a cover for a military intervention intended to put down a revolt. This upheaval actually has rather simple internal causes: the detonator is the rise in the price of gasoline, which has given rise to longstanding political claims.
Kazakhstan is an immense country – five times larger than France, albeit with a quarter of the inhabitants – it has a very rich subsoil and has been ruled for thirty years with an iron fist by only one man, the powerful Nursultan Nazarbaev, who has left the presidency in 2019 but maintained control of the state by leading the National Security Council.
His successor, Kassim-Jomart Tokaev, promised political reforms he never initiated, and today he pays the price in terms of public discontent.
But then Why did Putin intervene? There is a syndrome that affects the governments of the former Soviet countries: the force of the crowd that demolishes the statutes (on January 5 it was Nazarbaev’s) usually ends up overthrowing the regimes, as happened in Ukraine and Armenia.
Letting this process run its course in a country as important as Kazakhstan would have sent a bad signal to the Russian population. On January 6, the voices of the Russian opposition expected to undergo a new crackdown to avert any possibility of contagion of the “disease” that has struck Kazakhstan.
But above all, Putin wants to remain the boss in “his” zone of influence before negotiating with the United States. The problem is that his thesis on security guarantees is weakened by this new intervention against a revolt: it is evident that it is the peoples who need security, not the autocrats.
(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)
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