High stakes in Kazakhstan spiral

Vladimir Putin’s panicked response to the violence sweeping Kazakhstan, post-Soviet Central Asia’s most prosperous state and the world’s leading uranium producer, is not a surprise. It may be that underpinning the unrest is the settling of scores between President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and former president Nursultan Nazarbayev, who ruled what The Wall Street Journal has termed a “country of outsize importance” for 29 years following the Soviet Union’s collapse. But more worrying for Mr Putin and his revanchist ambition to recreate the old Soviet Union into a string of vassal states is the way the bloody insurrection, which started over a fuel price hike, spread like wildfire. It soon enveloped Almaty, taking on aspects of the popular uprising that led to the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s similarly autocratic and massively corrupt pro-Russian regime and its replacement by a pro-Western democratic government.

That is clearly not what the Russian despot is prepared to see happen, especially when he has deployed 200,000 troops along his border with Ukraine and is threatening a full-scale invasion to challenge the government in Kiev. The speed with which Mr Putin has sent 3000 mostly Russian troops (using the cover of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, Russia’s post-Soviet answer to NATO) to put down the uprising in Kazakhstan shows how concerned he is about what is a major threat to the Kremlin’s influence. It may be that the Russian deployment will end the violence that has seen government buildings torched and an untold number of civilians killed and wounded following an order by Mr Tokayev to shoot rioters on sight. But if the Russian troop deployment does end the violence, it is unlikely to provide more than a short-term respite in a crisis that has the potential to spur Islamist nationalism (Kazakhstan is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim) and bring it closer to Russia’s soft underbelly across its 7000km border with Kazakhstan. Mr Putin’s close ally, China, is also caught up in the crisis. Kazakhstan is a key customer of Xi Jinping’s dodgy Belt & Road Initiative and the biggest investor in what is the world’s largest landlocked nation.

The West may have little immediate leverage in the crisis in Kazakhstan. But it is imperative the US and its NATO allies leave Mr Putin in no doubt about the grave risks he is running by intervening militarily to back autocratic rulers facing popular unrest there and in other former Soviet republics, including Belarus.