Kazakhstan calls for a defense bloc without Russia in Central Asia

A diplomat before becoming a politician, Kazakh President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev has mastered the art of delivering a message at the right time, leaving the audience to think about what the message means.

His call last week for closer defense cooperation between Central Asian countries is a case in point.

The proposal has not gone unnoticed by pro-Kremlin commentary in Russia, which sees security in Central Asia and its sphere of privileged interests, despite the war in Ukraine.

And he won a strong endorsement from a pro-government media institute in Azerbaijan, a country that last month took part in rare events. Military exercises without Russia with Central Asian countries west of Kazakhstan.

But were Toqaev’s words more than posturing?

“Since the war in Ukraine began, Central Asia has had the chance to reinvent itself in a comfortable geopolitical space,” said Luca Anceschi, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow.

“They are trying to say that they are not on Russia’s side in Ukraine, like Belarus, but neither with Ukraine. They have ties to the West, but they are not pro-Western,” Anceschi told RFE/RL.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) and Kazakh President Toqaev disagree over the war in Ukraine at the 2022 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2022.

“But as the war continues, as the discussion of secondary sanctions grows, perhaps the governments of the region see that space shrinking somewhat.”

All the more reason then to emphasize regional integration in Central Asian terms, which Toqaev just did in an op-ed preface to the sixth consultative meeting of Central Asian presidents in Astana on August 9.

At the same time, “initiatives for integration in Central Asia they are often very vague about the details and sometimes represent nothing more than empty rhetoric,” argued Anceschi.

“Regional Security Architecture” without Russia?

The main impetus for closer cooperation in Central Asia came from Uzbekistan, the most populous country in the region and the only one that shares a border with every country in the region.

If under first President Islam Karimov Tashkent saw much of the neighborhood as an annoyance to be kept at bay, successor Shavkat Mirziyoev saw new opportunities for trade and diplomatic unity when he came to power in 2016.

In an August 14 article on the subject, former Uzbek Foreign Minister and Special Presidential Assistant for Foreign Policy Abdulaziz Komilov wrote that Uzbekistan “has assumed a special responsibility for the future of Central Asia” by “completely abandoning outdated approaches of establishing relations with neighbors”. “

That’s about as far as any Uzbek official will go when criticizing the late Karimov.

But it’s fair to say that Uzbekistan’s ties with all of its Central Asian neighbors have improved under Mirziyoev, with annual five-nation summits now appearing for the first time in 2018.

At the same time, countries in the region have traditionally had stronger economic and political relations with China and Russia than within the region.

So Toqaev’s op-ed on stronger regional ties in the state-run Kazakhstanskaya pravda — Central Asian Renaissance: Towards Sustainable Development And Prosperity — was bound to raise eyebrows.

Because beyond emphasizing Central Asia’s unique history and economic potential, Toqaev also called for “defense and security cooperation” and even “the creation of a regional security architecture” that includes a “catalogue of security risks” for Asia Central.

These were naturally the parts of the op-ed noted by commentators in Russia, whose war in Ukraine was obliquely mentioned by the author in terms of instability on the region’s perimeter.

To nationalist pro-Kremlin television and radio personality Sergei Mardan, Toqaev’s words indicated that Kazakhstan had lost faith in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a Russian-dominated military bloc that includes Central Asian countries, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

Mardan claimed that the CSTO had saved Toqaev and his administration from the “Mambet revolution” — code for the deadly January 2022 unrest in Kazakhstan, which left more than 230 dead and prompted the intervention of a peacekeeping force led by Russia.

Kazakh President Toqaev (left) welcomes Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoev in Astana on August 8.

By using “Mambets”, Mardan was using a Soviet-era slur for rural Kazakhs.

But Mardan told his approximately 240,000 followers on Telegram that “the idea of ​​forming a defense union in Central Asia cannot be called viable.”

“Each of the republics has its own interests (and) many border issues have not been resolved,” he said.

Enthusiasm in Baku

A “defense union” was not the exact phrase used by Toqaev, who made sure to mention in his article that he supported the participation of Central Asian states in a number of groupings, including the CSTO and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

But the idea of ​​a Central Asian NATO was capitalized on in other Russian comments on the Kazakh president’s article.

In his August 12 column Rats and Ships: ‘Central Asian Defense Union’ Smells Of The British Pound And Delusion, published in the Asia-focused Vostochniy ekspress, author Fedor Kirsanov insisted that the apparent proposal for a new regional bloc probably originated with the British intelligence agency MI6.

“Predictably, the idea of ​​the union was suggested by Toqaev, who recently donned the toga of a political thinker,” Kirsanov wrote.

“Of course, the tail of a red fox clearly sticks out from under the toga, but those are details,” he added.

Then there was the Russian-focused YouTube channel Khod Mysley (more than 450,000 subscribers), whose author asked if Toqaev was after Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian, which “under the leadership of the Anglo-Saxons, is slowly but surely turning Armenia from a friend of Russia into an enemy.”

Kazakhstan has been used to this kind of hostile rhetoric from Russia since it did not support Russia’s 2022 invasion — which came just a month after the historic unrest known as Bloody January.

But if Toqaev’s thoughts were frowned upon in Russia, they were praised in Baku by the private Haqqin media outlet — which is often seen as having close ties to hawks in the Azeri regime.

An article on Toqaev’s proposal by Haqqin’s Zukhra Novruzova described the Kazakh leader as “a highly experienced diplomat, significantly above his colleagues at the … Russian Foreign Ministry.”

And Toqaev’s concerns were “entirely logical,” Novruzova argued, given Russia’s tendency toward militarism and the uncertainty of when and how the war in Ukraine will end.

“All developments indicate that for the Kremlin elites, the peaceful development of Russia and the restoration of its economy are of no interest at all,” he said. “In other words, the Kremlin will not enter a peaceful path under the current regime — the machine of state aggression has been put into operation,” Novruzova wrote.

The view from Baku is even more interesting in light of the Birlestik-2024 military exercises involving Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in western Kazakhstan last month, as well as the small-scale naval exercises involving Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan in the Baku section . Caspian Sea last year.

Azerbaijan — which shares Turkish heritage with four of the five Central Asian states — has become a source of admiration for some analysts in the region since Turkey-allied Baku militarily reclaimed the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh from partner nominally Russian, Armenia.

And Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev attended the meeting of Central Asian leaders in Astana — the only head of state from outside the region to do so.

However, argues Fuad Shahbazov, a Baku-based political analyst, no one is really looking for new Eurasian military alliances at the moment.

“Azerbaijan believes that deepening ties with Central Asia gives it more room to manoeuvre,” Shahbazov said, noting that Baku is pursuing similar action with other countries against severing ties with the West and its complicated traditional ties with Russia.

But in the long term, the analyst says, Azerbaijan sees Central Asia through the lens of trade, especially through the lens of trade. Middle Corridor — a 6,500-kilometer trade route linking China to Europe via Central Asia and the Caucasus, but bypassing Russia — rather than security.

“In Kazakhstan, (Baku’s interest) is more energy and logistics,” Shahbazov told RFE/RL.

Via RFE/RL

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