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The roughly 100,000 Russian troops stationed near Ukraine constitutes the biggest security crisis in years for Europe and its allies, including the US. While in Kazakhstan, Russian President Vladimir Putin took this month’s brutal crackdown from the regime’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev as an opportunity to remind protesters revolutions will never be allowed to spread in the region and by deploying Moscow-led security alliance troops to help quell the unrest, the central Asian country remains firmly in his sphere of influence.
The tone of Putin’s rhetoric and the trajectory of military deployment leave little doubt over his intentions: to regain control over a wide swath of the former Soviet Union — even to the point of rolling back the footprint of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to the Cold War years. Indeed, during high-stakes NATO-Russia talks in Brussels last week, the chief US negotiator, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, told CNN Moscow had made no commitments to deescalate on the Ukrainian border.
Overhanging the US negotiations is a desire by the Biden administration to avoid a distraction from its intended pivot to the Indo-Pacific, especially resetting relations with China. But with many analysts agreeing threats of new, stinging sanctions have not deterred Russia’s adventurism in Europe, western diplomats may be negotiating with a largely empty toolbox.
The stakes for Putin are equally high. In the span of less than two years, Russia has had to manage two surprise uprisings on its doorstep: in Belarus and Kazakhstan. But from the Kremlin’s point of view, Kazakhstan, the largest of the former Soviet republics in central Asia, is a domino too important to fall.
Allowing Kazakhstan to drift further into a western orbit — for example, allowing for western-style democratic elections or responding to the popular outcry with more political freedoms — would be a blow to Russian pride and would indicate Moscow’s loosening the grip…
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Source : cnn
