The Kazakh president was not ungrateful. “I especially thank Russian President Vladimir Poutine. He responded very quickly, and above all in a friendly manner, to my appeal,” Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokaïev said on Friday in a televised address. The day before, a contingent of Russian troops and other countries allied with Moscow had joined the former Soviet republic to support the power in place, after several days of popular riots, during which the police killed dozens of demonstrators. “Constitutional order has been largely restored in all regions,” the Kazakh leader had welcomed earlier in the day, adding that the operations of the security forces would continue “until the total destruction of the militants”.
Sphere of influence
For Vladimir Poutine, this rescue of an allied regime at its borders has an air of déjà vu. During the major protests that rocked Belarus for several months between 2020 and 2021, the Russian leader showed unwavering support for his counterpart Alexander Lukashenko, appearing as his lifeline. A few months later, last September, the two leaders signed an agreement to strengthen economic integration between their countries. Russia was also arbiter after the war that broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the fall of 2020 in Nagorno-Karabakh, deploying 2,000 soldiers in charge of peacekeeping.
“With this role of policeman, Putin wants to show that Russia is at the center of the game and that it remains the guarantor of the security of the countries of the former Eastern bloc, as in the days of the USSR”, analysis Carole Grimaud Potter, founder of the Center for Russia and Eastern Europe Research. “Its main objective is to keep these countries in its sphere of influence.”
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Not surprising from the man who, in 2005, described the fall of the USSR as “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century”. “It was a disintegration of historic Russia under the name of the Soviet Union”, he hammered again last December in a documentary broadcast on Russian television. What is more, “Russia fears that a revolt in one of the countries of its sphere of influence will bring down a regime which is favorable to it”, points out Carole Grimaud Potter. The memory of the dismissal in Ukraine of President Viktor Yanukovych, Putin’s staunch ally, following a protest movement in 2014, remains vivid.
“The Russians will ask for concessions”
“This crisis in Kazakhstan represents a danger for Putin, because it can constitute the bed of a new color revolution [soulèvements populaires en Eurasie et au Moyen-Orient dans les années 2000, NDLR]. Indeed, if this revolt began against the rise in the price of gas, many demonstrators quickly called for getting rid of the regime in place, “says Galia Ackerman, historian specializing in Russia and the post-Soviet space.
The help given by the master of the Kremlin to his Kazakh counterpart is far from selfless. Evidenced by the list of demands drawn up on Wednesday on Twitter by the editor-in-chief of Russia Today (voice of power), Margarita Simonian, in return for a Russian intervention. “We must certainly help, but we must also set certain conditions”, she indicated, demanding among other things the “recognition of Crimea”, of Russian as “second official language” or “the hunt for anti-NGOs. Russian “.
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“If the Russian intervention allows Tokaïev to retain his power, it is clear that the Russians will ask him for concessions. This could be greater integration between the two countries, or at least diplomatic gestures”, summarizes Galia Ackerman. Enough to allow Putin to further advance his pawns in the country.
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