Russian President Putin visited Astana for a summit with Kazakhstan's Kasym-Zhomart Tokayev on November 27-28. The optics of the arrival – fighter jets overhead and armored cars at major intersections – made a striking impression, as did the message on the airport’s giant display board welcoming ‘His Excellency Vladimir Putin’ plus the abundance of Russian Federation flags along the route of the motorcade. According to news reports, 20 bilateral agreements were signed, including deals on railroad and highway infrastructure, cooperation among law enforcement and judicial agencies, and renovation of a major electrical power plant near Ekibastuz near the heart of Kazakhstan’s mining and metallurgical industry.
The joint statement following the Summit also cited an agreement reached to “strengthen the strategic partnership in conditions of a new world order” with “mutual respect for sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity.” The last bit about mutual respect would be what Kazakhstan wanted to see in the communique, while Russia wanted the first part, since I believe they’re hoping Trump’s election ushers in a ‘new world order’ where they are freed of sanctions. And surely it was the Russian side that pushed for calling the summit a “historical event and important milestone” in Russian-Kazakh relations.
Kazakhstan unquestionably maintains a strategic partnership with Russia even as Astana works to strengthen its relationships with the EU, US and Gulf States, all of whom are important sources of foreign investment and geopolitical support. Not long ago, Russia was by far Kazakhstan’s main trade partner, but in 2023 China took over the top spot, and the gap is growing. Imports of Chinese machinery and equipment previously purchased from Russia have increased significantly, while exports going the other way include critical minerals (copper ore, concentrate and cathodes plus rare earth metals) in addition to oil and gas.
The fact is, Kazakhstan has no prudent alternative to maintaining its partnership with Russia. First, it is beneficial to the economy, given the geographical proximity and the significant degree of industrial integration inherited from the USSR. Second, one could argue it is also an act of self-preservation, given Russia’s often aggressive stance toward former Soviet republics and its status as a major military power with whom Kazakhstan shares a border that is 7,600 kilometers long. So, President Tokayev and his team continue the country’s multi-vector foreign policy, which some have described as walking a tightrope between Russia and China, their powerful neighbors, and Western countries, with whom they want stronger ties. At the moment, that means leaning a little harder toward Moscow, because Putin would seem to be riding a wave of enhanced regional influence following Trump’s victory in the US.
The message welcoming Putin as ‘your excellency’ frustrated those in Kazakhstan who want their country to have stronger relations with Europe and the US. Three social activists in the city of Kokshetau, a regional center northwest of Astana, were detained for standing on a street corner waving the flags of Kazakhstan and Ukraine. One held a sign that read, “Your Excellency, get the hell out of Kazakhstan!”
The summit was also witness to a curious incident at the Astana Opera Theater, where Ukraine’s yellow and blue flag appeared on the neon billboard announcing future events. The theater’s administration clumsily tried to explain it away as a technical glitch, but the State Technical Service of Kazakhstan stated plainly that it was an act of “illegal outside interference with the functioning of the theater’s equipment” and added that it was the work of hackers using proxy servers with foreign IP addresses.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Astana did not comment on the detainment of the activists or the Opera Theater incident, but released a statement saying the welcome message using the words ‘your excellency’ is normal protocol for visits by foreign heads of state. Sure, but President Putin was never welcomed here that way before. In my opinion, the wording on the airport billboard would have read differently, i.e. less grandiose, had the Democrats won the election on November 5. The wording signals, in my view, that Astana may be anticipating changes in US foreign policy more supportive or at least less critical of Vladimir Putin.
Kazakhstan has become truly expert at balancing its relationships with different countries and regions, and in particular its relationship with Russia. In September, at a meeting with German Chancellor Scholz, President Tokayev called Russia an invincible country – meaning one that could not be defeated militarily, while two years earlier, sitting next to President Putin at an economic forum in St. Petersburg, Tokayev refused to recognize Russia’s claims to territory in Ukraine. And even after welcoming Putin to Astana as ‘your excellency,’ he startled the Russia delegation at the post-Summit press briefing by beginning his remarks in the Kazakh language, leaving Foreign Minister Lavrov and President Putin exchanging glances with Dmitri Peskov and scrambling for their earphones so they could hear the simultaneous translation. By the time they were plugged in, Tokayev had switched to Russian.
Tokayev and his team, in my opinion, understand well what they can and can’t do with Moscow. They push forward and pull back based on how they read current events. And they have what I consider reliable regional support from two important players, first from Turkiye, which leads the Organization of Turkic States, whose importance in Central Asia has grown significantly since February 2022, but most importantly from China, which is now clearly a stronger neighbor than Russia and more important than Russia to Kazakhstan’s economy. China, I believe, considers Kazakhstan relevant to its interests as a source of raw materials and the eastern link in an international trade route to Europe via the Caspian port of Baku in Azerbaijan. If Beijing were to see turmoil caused by Russian intimidation disrupting China’s business in Kazakhstan and were to impress on Moscow its insistence on regional stability, I believe it could ensure that the Russians shelve any plans to make a belligerent move aimed at seizing territory in Kazakhstan’s north.
This is an irony not lost on the Kazakhs, whose ethnohistorical DNA holds a centuries-long fear of invasion from China, going back to when the Kazakh’s ancestors fought off recurring incursions by the Jungars (or Dzungars), who lived in an area that stretched from the western edge of the Great Wall of China to present-day eastern Kazakhstan, and in 1725 succeeded in conquering Turkistan and Tashkent. In the Soviet years, as is well known, textbooks distributed to Chinese school children showed Almaty and other parts of Kazakhstan adjacent to the border as belonging to China. Since the advent of Kazakhstan’s independence, the country has faced the challenge of staving off creeping Chinese expansionism in the form of a soft (economic) takeover of their country. Now, economic and geopolitical developments in Central Asia since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine place Kazakhstan in the position of viewing China as a deterrent against the threat of potential Russian aggression.
Written by: Richard Spooner
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