here is an example :
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....
POSTED BY LAMPLIGHTER
