Putin's War in Ukraine Pushes ex-Soviet States Toward New Allies

More from the article...

...Officials from ex-Soviet states in central Asia and the Caucasus say the war has prompted their governments to look for ways to reduce dependence on Moscow by turning to rival powers including Turkey, the European Union and Middle East countries. All spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing the Kremlin.

Current and former Russian officials, also speaking on condition they not be identified, said Moscow is reacting nervously, even harshly, as the Kremlin becomes less certain of its ability to assert influence in its own backyard.

Russia has been for decades "a veto player, a gatekeeper in northern Eurasia where nothing much could happen if the Kremlin didn't like it," said Ekaterina Schulmann, a Russian political scientist now based in Berlin. "Now that seems to be changing" with Russia unlikely to emerge stronger from the war in Ukraine, and "this makes dictating one's will to neighbors problematic, to say the least."

While the failure of a key Kremlin war aim is clearest in Ukraine and Moldova, which applied for EU membership and gained candidate status after the conflict erupted, the invasion has forced even traditional friends such as Kazakhstan and Armenia to actively build ties with powers that Moscow long sought to keep at bay in the region. That has allowed Turkey in particular to step in to the void.

Announcing his Feb. 24 invasion, Putin at the time cited Kazakhstan as a model for the kind of relationship he wanted Russia to have with ex-Soviet states. He'd sent troops to help President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev crush deadly riots only the previous month.

Yet Tokayev has since disagreed openly with Putin's justification for the war, while allowing hundreds of thousands of Russians to flee to central Asia's largest oil exporter after Russia announced mobilization in September. Schulmann, who was designated a "foreign agent" by the Kremlin days after she left Russia in April, was welcomed in Kazakhstan this month by the head of its Senate, the country's second-highest official, and offered a professorship at one of its universities....

@#2

imo, "suspicious" is a gross understatement in your comment.

But, yeah, I agree.

@#2

And as a sub-question....

Did Pres Putin think his unprovoked invasion of a sovereign Ukraine would suddenly trigger all the former Soviet Socialst Republics to join his, let's call it, team?

Is he really that delusional?

@#5 ... PBS has a documentary ...

Got a link?

thx.

@#7 ... The countries mentioned in this article were already on the team.

Now they are free agents....

That was my view of what the article reported. Maybe not the direction Pres Putin had hoped for.

... Waiting patiently for Effete and Wolf to spin this as a glorious win for team Comrade. ...

Those aliases have been so obvious. There was another, also. But I forget its appellation.

So, how long do you think it will be before they are replaced?

Maybe with a ChatGPT bot?

Who knows?

The AI bot can't do any worse than those two (three) aliases have done.

:)

Another view...

Russia in the Caucasus and Central Asia After the Invasion of Ukraine
www.lawfareblog.com

...Any assessment of Russia's influence in Central Asia must begin with an analysis of Kazakhstan, where just prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Moscow, for the first time ever, agreed to deploy CSTO troops to support the government of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. In January 2022, what began as demonstrations against rising fuel prices became violent protests that the Kazakh government claimed were infiltrated by foreign terrorists. By blaming outsiders, Tokayev provided a legal basis for Kazakhstan's CSTO allies to intervene. At the time, observers speculated that Tokayev had ceded Kazakhstan's sovereignty in order to remain in power.

With hindsight, it seems plausible that Putin agreed to the limited deployment to establish calm on Russia's borders prior to the launch of the Ukraine invasion. Whether or not the Kremlin wanted to save Tokayev, it was clear that Moscow expected gratitude for the intervention. Instead, with the two-week deployment over and with Tokayev firmly in power, the Kazakh president moved to create distance from the Kremlin. He initially called upon both Russia and Ukraine to pursue dialogue, and when the U.N. Security Council voted to condemn the Russian invasion, Kazakhstan abstained. Later, Tokayev refused a request to supply troops to the Kremlin's war effort.

Then, at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June, the Kazakh president"on a stage with Putin"said that he would not recognize "quasi-state formations" in the Donbas. Russia retaliated by closing Novorossiysk to shipments of Kazakh oil. And in return, Kazakhstan blocked 1,700 Russian coal wagons on its territory. Kazakhstan's cautious declaration of independence demonstrates that the longer the Ukraine war goes on, the further the attenuation of the Central Asian states from Moscow.

If Kazakhstan is an example of how the Ukraine war is roiling Moscow's relations with its supposed allies, the outbreak of hostilities between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan underscores how distracted and diminished the Kremlin has become in the region. Although the Central Asian clashes did not receive the same kind of international attention as the war in the Caucasus, the fighting is estimated to have left close to 100 people dead and to have displaced over 120,000 people. When clashes erupted on Sept. 14, 2022, along an undemarcated part of the border, Putin, as he did in the almost concurrent case of Armenia and Azerbaijan, called upon the leaders to resolve the situation "exclusively by peaceful, political and diplomatic means as soon as possible."

The ways in which the conflicts in the Caucasus and Central Asia have strained Russia's role in the post-Soviet space were on display at the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), hosted in Samarkand, Uzbekistan"in mid-September, just as fighting got underway. ...

Good article, imo, worth a read....

@#26 ... Why is it so hard to understand that Russia will decimate the Ukraine and take it over? ...

So... your comment seems to admit that Pres Putin's goal is to destroy, annex and eliminate Ukraine.

So good to see your alias admit that.

@#16 ... the war over there is not our business. ...

Why?

Pres Putin launches an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country for the purpose of annexing and eliminating that country.

Is your comment saying that we should just allow Pres Putin to do whatever his whims tell him to do? Even if his whims include destroying a sovereign country?

Is that what your comment is asserting?

Really, you do need to try harder. Or, maybe, call in one of your back-up aliases. :)