Russian Rhetoric Toward Central Asia Grows Increasingly Hostile - Jamestown
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Executive Summary: Russia’s rhetoric toward Central Asian countries, including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, has become increasingly hostile since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.  The rhetoric from Russia includes threats of invasion and annexation, reminiscent of the language used toward Ukraine before its invasion. Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russian media has escalated its attacks on Central …

The hostile rhetoric and actions from Russia have eroded trust and relations between Russia and Central Asian countries, including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marked a change in Russian public and media figures’ rhetoric toward Central Asia. They turned the rare hostile statement into regular lines of attack from the Kremlin’s propaganda machine. A month after the invasion, another Duma deputy, Sergei Savostyanov, offered to expand the ongoing “denazification and demilitarization operation” in Ukraine to include Kazakhstan, among other post-Soviet states.

A month after this incident, Russian television host and husband of the central propaganda figure Margarita Simonyan, Tegran Keosyan, accused Kazakhstan of “ungratefulness” and threatened the country, calling for it “to look at Ukraine” in response to the country’s decision to cancel the annual parade commemorating the Soviet Union’s victory in the World War II.

Even high-level Russian officials have made hostile statements toward Central Asia, questioning their sovereignty and statehood. In August 2022, Russia’s former president and deputy chair of the Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, designated Kazakhstan as an “artificial state” built on the territory gifted by Russia. Medvedev further blamed Astana for implementing policies that “could be classified as genocide of [ethnic] Russians”.

[Edit typo.]

  • tal@lemmy.today
    0·
    8 months ago

    https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/05/31/central-asia-russia-china-kazakhstan-kyrgyzstan-sco-play-both-sides/

    Central Asian countries have always made a strong play for being the master of their own destinies. Policymakers in the region tout their ability to sit in the driver’s seat and navigate international relations through balancing everyone against each other. Yet last month’s high-level engagements with China and Russia have instead served to highlight Central Asia countries’ growing bonds with both powers and the shrinking room for maneuver they have in international relations.

    The invasion of Ukraine has thrown Beijing’s role in Central Asia newly into question, both in terms of Moscow’s bandwidth to play a security provider role in the region while Ukraine consumes its military, and fears about how Moscow’s revanchist eye might turn toward the region.

    In Kazakhstan, this fear is acute given the ease with which one can look at the country through Moscow’s eyes and see a very similar history that could justify an incursion as Putin did in Ukraine. The nation shares a long border with Russia and has a large ethnically Russian population that often feels targeted by national policies seeking to advance the Kazakh language. Senior Russian figures (including Putin) have questioned the nation’s statehood. Back in September 2014, after he first pushed an incursion into Ukraine, Putin seemed to deny Kazakh statehood in a speech, saying that then-President Nursultan Nazarbayev had “created a state on a territory that never had a state.”

    Consequently, when Xi visited Kazakhstan in September 2022, a lot of public noise was made about his declaration that China would support “Kazakhstan in safeguarding national independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity.” Among more optimistic public commentators, this was seen as a clear message to defend Kazakhstan against potential Russian aggression.

    In contrast, speaking to officials in Kazakhstan and the wider region, we found a far more sanguine picture. Most of them noted the similarity in what Xi said in Kazakhstan to what China had said about Ukraine before the Russian invasion (and even in the peace plan proposed by China), and China’s lack of action in stopping the conflict there. “We are on our own” was one particularly stark assessment we heard in Kazakhstan.

    This highlights both the fact that China and Russia are eager to coordinate in Central Asia and that their basic aims in the region are the same. This complicates diplomacy for the Central Asian governments that have long sought to play the two countries off each other. And it is a perfect articulation of the shrinking geopolitical space that Central Asia increasingly finds itself within.

    Entirely surrounded by powers in some level of conflict with the West, Central Asia finds its options are increasingly limited. This is not to say other options are not available—simultaneous to the Xian summit, Kazakhstan hosted a high-level economic forum with the European Union; the United States is a constant presence; and Turkey has made a great deal of noise about Turkic influence in the region over the past year via the Organization of Turkic States. But as the ties that bind China and Russia thicken, Central Asia will struggle to really balance against them.