Anna, the crisis in Kazakhstan appears more complex than it seems. Is it just a revolt dictated by rising bills
Or there is something more, A coup d’etat
A conflict between clans

And all these things. A revolt due to socio-economic discontent, which has become a political protest, an explosion of long-suppressed anger. Which was ridden by incumbent President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to eliminate his senior partner Nursultan Nazarbaev, the first president of Kazakhstan for 30 years, who has remained since 2019 in the position of Yelbasi, the leader of the nation, a sort of super-president who had himself advocate for a number of functions, including national security and the appointment of governors. So it is also a conflict between clans, in a society that is still often divided along lines of belonging to large tribal and political “families”, and the arrests of Nazarbaev’s loyalists in recent days prove this. There are political differences between Tokayev and Nazarbaev
Narzabajev is said to have been more attentive to relations with the West than Tokayev near China

It would seem so, Tokayev has a reputation as a “pro-Chinese”, he was also an ambassador to Singapore for a long time and knows that part of the world. Nazarbaev set his politics of him as “multivectoral”, and he had succeeded: he was on good political and commercial relations with Russia and Washington, Ankara and Beijing, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. He was not an ally of Putin, but he tried not to argue with us, even if he distanced himself from Moscow especially after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, fearing that Russian neo-colonialism could also point to the Russian-speaking North of Kazakhstan. The military distress call launched by Tokaev to the Russians, and approved by China, suggests that the new leadership could move the arrow of this compass further east.Do you think that Putin’s military intervention is also done on behalf of China
It would be a truly disturbing hypothesis, the first manifestation of that nightmare of many in Europe and America which would see Russia as the armed (and mining) arm of China. I believe that China has been consenting at the very least, as evidenced not only by Xi Jinping’s words of strong encouragement towards Tokaev, but also by the prudence with which Beijing has commented from the early hours on an escalation at the doorstep that he couldn’t help but worry unless she knew its origin and dynamics. On the other hand, China is becoming more and more assertive on the international scene, and perhaps “multivectoral” regional powers such as Nazarbaev’s Kazakhstan in this context could no longer remain equidistant. It should also be remembered that Kazakhstan shares a long border with China that passes through Xinjiang, the Uyghur territory that the government of Beijing considers a hostile ethnic group, and the Uyghur minority is also present and influential in Kazakhstan. It is not excluded that Tokaev had also provided guarantees on this aspect, compared to Nazarbaev who had entrusted his National Security Committee, the equivalent of the KGB, to an ethnic Uighur, Marim Massimov, who in fact was promptly arrested by the new regime.Indeed, the troops sent by Putin have restored order
Officially, Russian troops do not participate in the repression of the protest, limiting themselves to guarding strategic sites and palaces of power. Testimonies from independent journalists, however, speak of soldiers who speak Russian and who fired on the crowd in the square of Almaty. An information to be verified, also because if true it could trigger a protest in the Kazakhs moved at this point by an anti-colonial sentiment. For now it seems that Putin’s para have served more than anything else to convince the local security apparatuses – subordinated until a few days ago to the former president Nazarbaev – to support Tokaev in his coup, under the threat that otherwise the Russians. But we have also seen Moscow send more and more massive reinforcements to Kazakhstan,The regime speaks of “terrorists”. It’s true or it’s just a propaganda hoax
It is clearly a propaganda language, similar to that used by Moscow first against the Chechen rebels and subsequently also against the “extremist” opposition of Alexey Navalny. Tokaev even spoke of 20,000 terrorists who would have attacked Almaty, only to delete the tweet, perhaps realizing the enormity of the number. Another “terrorist” shown on Kazakh TV turned out to be a Kyrgyz jazz player on tour in Kazakhstan: stopped and beaten, he was forced to “confess” in front of the cameras. Moreover, the government spoke of “terrorists trained and flanked from abroad”, a justification also for requesting the intervention of the former Soviet collective defense pact which is triggered only in the event of an external threat,On a social level, what Kazakhstan presents itself as Kazakhstan is
a very complex country, characterized like many other post-Soviet countries by a kleptocracy that monopolizes the income from natural resources, with a population that instead lives in a situation of hardship and poverty. It would be enough to look at the increase in bills that sparked the first protests, negligible according to Western parameters, but conspicuous in an area where wages are around 130-150 euros. We must also remember that it is a huge country – nine times Italy – and very heterogeneous, ethnically, geographically, economically and culturally, a country that has invested heavily in modernization, but much less in welfare. Opposition to the regime by whom it is composed
It is quite difficult to speak of a structured opposition, due to the repressive character of the regime. There are several dissenters, many of them abroad, and local activists, but it is difficult to speak of a single movement. After all, in all these days the square has not produced a face, a name, a slogan, the impression and that it was many different squares with different needs and demands, from the protest against the increase in the price of gas to Aktau, in the west, to the social one of metallurgists in the Russian-speaking North of Pavlodar, to the riots caused in Almaty by groups of young people from the villages, who came – or perhaps sent – to vent their anger as outcasts in the luxurious shopping centers of the former capital in the South. What is evident is the common denominator of this anger:Let’s go back to the energy factor. Kazakhstan is full of energy. Why this increase in bills
It seems that it is due to the presence of the companies that manage the “bitcoins”. This is realistic

The bitcoin theory suddenly appeared essentially in the Italian media, but I don’t think it is very realistic: the increase, indeed, to be precise, the liberalization of the gas market that led to the increase, had been decided some time before that bitcoin mining became a business. The price of energy for the population in Kazakhstan is heavily subsidized, as per Soviet tradition, and all post-Soviet countries have sooner or later had to go to more market prices, always facing strong discontent from the population. In the case of Kazakhstan certainly there were more chances to take it easy, given the abundant local resources, but some observers speak of sops that Tokaev should have given to some of him oligarchs, also to reward them in the struggle between his loyalists and Nazarbaev’s. In such an opaque and complex political system it is difficult to say if it is true, but it seems a more plausible explanation than the plots of bitcoin, whose mining is popular in Kazakhstan precisely because energy is cheap as it is subsidized by the state.Last question: Ukraine and Kazakhstan. What is Putin’s ultimate goal
Europe and the US can do something

We will see in the coming days if the military intervention in Kazakhstan will give Putin an unexpected card to play in the negotiations with the West as the new military guarantor of a post-Soviet regime, or if, on the contrary, a commitment on the Eastern front will force him to slow down. escalation on the West flank. Putin’s ultimate goal is that declared by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, to rebuild if not the USSR, an empire where Russia dominates, in an opposition to the West that resumes cold war tones even if the ideology is not more communist. The other objective is to preserve his regime, and to guarantee the safety and security of the wealth to his family, understood in a political sense but also in a strict sense. From this point of view, the story of Kazakhstan is a disturbing sign, and probably the political patricide committed by Tokaev against Nazarbaev can only persuade Putin to avoid transmitting power to a “dolphin”, and possibly remain on the throne forever. And in order to do so, he needs to control Russia in an even more rigid way than he has done so far, in a situation of economic, health and also political crisis, with consensus plummeting. Ukraine in this vision is a bit of a casus belli to scare away with a war and therefore negotiate a pact that keeps the West away with its sanctions and its focus on rights and freedoms, and much a precedent that Putin cannot allow the Russians to see: a post-Soviet country, which comes out of the same system, speaks the same language and largely shares the same structure as Russia, m who wants and manages to become a democracy that comes close to Europe. Without Ukraine, any empire that Putin tries to rebuild on the ashes of the former USSR will always be incomplete. It is what the US and Europe can do and make it clear to the Kremlin that the talks about territorial claims, and about people that “historically do not exist” have already produced tragedies wherever they have been made. There is no shortage of economic and legal instruments: the Moscow oligarchs export to the West and above all invest in the West, where they bring their money and their families, where they buy houses, yachts and football teams. Ukraine, any empire that Putin tries to rebuild on the ashes of the former USSR will always be incomplete. It is what the US and Europe can do and make it clear to the Kremlin that the talks about territorial claims, and about people that “historically do not exist” have already produced tragedies wherever they have been made. There is no shortage of economic and legal instruments: the Moscow oligarchs export to the West and above all invest in the West, where they bring their money and their families, where they buy houses, yachts and football teams. Ukraine, any empire that Putin tries to rebuild on the ashes of the former USSR will always be incomplete. It is what the US and Europe can do and make it clear to the Kremlin that the talks about territorial claims, and about people that “historically do not exist” have already produced tragedies wherever they have been made. There is no shortage of economic and legal instruments: the Moscow oligarchs export to the West and above all invest in the West, where they bring their money and their families, where they buy houses, yachts and football teams. they have already produced tragedies wherever they have been made. There is no shortage of economic and legal instruments: the Moscow oligarchs export to the West and above all invest in the West, where they bring their money and their families, where they buy houses, yachts and football teams. they have already produced tragedies wherever they have been made. There is no shortage of economic and legal instruments: the Moscow oligarchs export to the West and above all invest in the West, where they bring their money and their families, where they buy houses, yachts and football teams.

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