Kazakhstan’s Ongoing Military Expansion May Ultimately Threaten Russia – OpEd
By Paul Goble
Kazakhstan has been reforming, modernizing and expanding its military forces since the January 2022 events forced Astana to call in forces from the Organization of the Collective Security Treaty to put them down. It is thus directed primarily against internal threats rather than at neighboring countries, Maksim Kramarenko says.
But the Moscow security analyst says that there is a foreign dimension to this build up because of the possibility that outside countries may exploit domestic problem as part of a hybrid war effort against Kazakhstan (ia-centr.ru/experts/maksim-kramarenko/kazakhstan-gotovitsya-k-voyne-s-kem-i-dlya-chego/).
Among the signs pointing to that conclusion is Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s appointment of an interior ministry general to head the defense ministry and revisions Kazakhstan’s defense doctrine that stress the link between domestic and foreign threats (tengrinews.kz/kazakhstan_news/tokaev-vnes-izmeneniya-v-voennuyu-doktrinu-kazahstana-480536/).
But other changes in that doctrine raise questions that must be of concern to Moscow, Kramarenko says. The Kazakhstan document now specifies that one of the tasks of the country’s military is to block any efforts to change the international order. That puts Kazakhstan on the side of the West given that both Russia and China are seeking a new and more just order.
And because that is so, the analyst concludes, it is entirely possible that Kazakhstan’s expanded and modernized army will act in support of the West against Russian and Chinese moves, something Moscow must be ready to block or even prevent by taking action before Astana goes too far.
