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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.”