Kazakhstan’s Staying In The CSTO Seems To Be Getting Weirder Lately – OpEd

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A regular meeting of the Council of the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) member countries’ Defense Ministers took place on Friday in Almaty. Armenia did not participate in the event. This is no surprise – although Armenia has not withdrawn from the CSTO, it does not participate in the organization’s activities, including joint military exercises. Earlier Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said in parliament that he knows “at least two CSTO countries that participated in the preparation of war” against Armenia, and Yerevan announced about stopping partaking in funding the Collective Security Treaty Organization, which also includes Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Armenia, as the Russian media put it, “continued its boycott of the CSTO, having evaded participation in the CSTO event in Almaty”.

Thus, the Collective Security Treaty Organization in its present state is just Russia and Belarus which are formally part of a union state and currently under Western sanctions, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, now and then coming into armed conflict with each other, and Kazakhstan whose stay in the CSTO seems to be getting weirder lately. This is what this post-Soviet military-political alliance looks like today. 

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan explained the suspension of its country’s participation in the CSTO activities as follows: Armenia can no longer rely on Russia as its main defense and military partner because Moscow has repeatedly let it down so Yerevan must think about forging closer ties with the United States and France. He questioned whether Armenia should remain a member of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and said Armenia needed a new national security strategy and would strengthen its army. Armenia’s PM said that the CSTO couldn’t be relied upon and he did not have an answer to the question of the Armenian society, why in such a situation, the country should remain a member of the organization. “If we rely on an organization that is not worth relying on, then not only we but also others [other members of the CSTO] cannot rely on it”, he noted.  Yerevan is chiding Moscow for, among other things, having formed a strategic partnership and allied cooperation with Azerbaijan, and Minsk for having taken a pro-Azerbaijani stance in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.

When Nikol Pashinyan says, that other members of the CSTO also ‘cannot rely’ on that organization, you realize that he is kind of right, well, at least when it comes to Kazakhstan. The Kremlin, following the example of Louis XIV from Bourbon dynasty, who once said, “I am the state”, can claim, “I am the CSTO”, and nobody will most probably deny that. In other words, the CSTO is the Russian Federation, primarily. 

What is Russia’s attitude to Kazakhstan? And what do the Russian politicians and public figures who greatly contribute to shaping public opinion in the Russian Federation really feel about Kazakhstan and Kazakhs? Russian President Vladimir Putin described Russia and Kazakhstan as the closest allies during the November 2023 talks with his Kazakh counterpart, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, in Astana. “We say that Russia and Kazakhstan are allies. I would like to stress that, at least in Russia’s view, we are not just allies, we are the closest allies”, he then emphasized

However, this view of the Russian political and media establishment’s attitude towards Kazakhstan and Kazakhs is not confirmed by life. The reality of today is that scarcely a day goes by without news of a verbal attack by some Russian MP or prominent media figure on the territorial integrity of Kazakhstan and the ethnic Kazakhs’ human dignity. The days just before the CSTO event in Almaty were no exception in this sense. 

In an interview with Komsomol’skaya Pravda-Radio, Pyotr Tolstoy, the Deputy Speaker of Russia’s Parliament, claimed Kazakhstan could become the ‘next problem’ for Russia after Ukraine. Currenttime.tv commented on the speeches of the Russian MP as follows: “Russian politicians go on to look for enemies in neighboring countries. And once again, they are turning their attention to Kazakhstan”. How can one believe that it’s about the country which is, according to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s closest ally? 

It’s not the first time that’s happened. Such [as yet only] verbal attacks take place with regularity. In short, there is still no shortage of politicians and public figures in Russia who are poised to indulge their arrogance concerning Kazakhstan in every possible way.

Here’s what else is noteworthy. The interview video of Pyotr Tolstoy was posted on the Internet a week ago, on May 24. As far as it can be judged from media reports, a pair of Ukrainian outlets, focus.ua, and antikor.com.ua, were the first to publicly sound the alarm about Pyotr Tolstoy’s claim concerning “Russia’s historical right about Kazakhstan”. This was on May 29. On Thursday, May 30, Kazakhstani journalists asked the Chairman of the Senate of the Kazakh Parliament, Maulen Ashimbayev, to comment on the claim by Pyotr Tolstoy.  He answered, “I think this is the opinion of a private person, and it does not reflect the official position of the State Duma”. According to him, “an MP can speak in different contexts, for example, he can either speak as a private person or express the position of an institution”. Here one question involuntarily arises. If the Deputy Speaker of Russia’s Parliament can, according to Maulen Ashimbaev, be considered a private person in this case, should the Chairman of the Senate of the Kazakh Parliament who undertook to comment on Pyotr Tolstoy’s words, be regarded as a private person, too? “Therefore, it seems to me that there is no need to dramatize or aggravate things here. In any case, let me take a look at his statements and get back to this issue”, Maulen Ashimbayev added.

Anyway, one gets the impression that the Russian MPs and politicians do not hold back in expressions, insulting Kazakhstan and Kazakhs, as the Kazakhstani officials and MPs try in every way to convince their compatriots that there is nothing to worry about. It is not easy for the latter to achieve such an objective now, in conditions of information being totally and easily accessible. It is easy to draw a parallel between Pyotr Tolstoy’s current claims and the words said by Vladimir Putin ten years earlier.

In the May 24 2024 interview with Komsomol’skaya Pravda-Radio, the Deputy Speaker of Russia’s Parliament said: “Look at what is happening today in Kazakhstan in terms of building a certain Kazakh state. National myths are running rampant there. Look at the national myths about independence and switching to the Latin alphabet, running rampant up there”.

“The Kazakhs never had any statehood”, Vladimir Putin said to an audience of young people in Russia on August 29, 2014. He meant that ‘there had never been a country called Kazakhstan, that the republic was purely the product’ of the then president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Kazakhstan, the Russian president noted, was “part of the large Russian world that is part of the global civilization in terms of industry and advanced technologies. I am confident that that’s the way things are going to be in the medium – and long-term”. President Vladimir Putin talked about all that shortly after the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the Russian intervention in the Donbas. It felt as if he called into question the legitimacy of the post-Soviet state of Kazakhstan while ordering the Kazakhs to be on their best behavior when it came to serving Russian interests. Like, otherwise they were going to be involved in a situation that was similar to the one in Ukraine.

Pyotr Tolstoy has now said roughly the same thing.

Akhas Tazhutov

Akhas Tazhutov is a political analyst from Kazakhstan.

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