Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev announced on Friday that he has given permission for law enforcement agents to use lethal force to quell the unrest that has engulfed the country since the new year.
“I have given an order to the law enforcement and military to shoot to kill without warning,” Tokayev announced on Friday.
The president has rejected the idea of resolving the ongoing crisis through negotiations. “It’s nonsense. What kind of talks can one have with criminals and murderers?” he insisted.
Kazakhstan is facing “armed and well-trained militants, both local and foreign,”Tokayev said. Describing them as “bandits and terrorists,” he asserted that they should be “eliminated.”
The situation has mostly stabilized in Almaty, Aktobe, and elsewhere across the country, he said, but the security forces are continuing their “anti-terrorist operation,” as not all of the perpetrators have laid down their weapons.
Those who attacked the country acted in accordance with a well-designed plan, Tokayev said, targeting key military, administrative, and social facilities in almost all of the regions.
“Only in Almaty, there were 20,000 bandits,” he alleged. They were backed by propaganda experts who spread fake news online and manipulated the mood of the people, the president insisted.
Fyodor Lukyanov: Kazakhstan intervention sees Russia set a new precedent
Fyodor Lukyanov,
The sudden outbreak of violence in Kazakhstan has taken analysts and international observers by surprise. Now, the decision to deploy a regional peacekeeping force has become the latest major milestone for the post-Soviet space.
In the early hours of Thursday morning, the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which joins the armed forces of six former republics of the USSR, including Kazakhstan, announced that it would send a peacekeeping force to help maintain order as unrest spread across the vast Central Asian nation.
The move represents a blurring of the line between internal and external processes – the reasons that the Kazakh government is teetering on the brink of collapse are domestic in nature, and are related to the prolonged and increasingly weird transfer of power after the almost three-decades-long rule of veteran leader Nursultan Nazarbayev.
However, the street protests, which were sparked by fuel prices and have seen government buildings torched and troops surrender to demonstrators, have been immediately presented as an act of outside aggression on the part of foreign “terrorist groups.” From now on, it seems, the enemy always comes from the outside, even if it is actually inside. That claim gives formal grounds to declare the country is under attack and call in the CSTO.
It is worth noting that, this time, the request for peacekeepers came from a government with undisputed legitimacy – even the protesters themselves have only publicly demanded the departure of Nazarbayev, who maintains a hold over domestic politics, and not the current president. This is what makes it different from the events of 2010 in Bishkek, when acting Kyrgyz president Roza Otunbayeva tried to call the CSTO in after his predecessor, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, was ousted by mass protests.
In the future, we will probably learn more about how everything happened – the decision-making process in both Kazakhstan and Russia and who suggested involving the CSTO. For now, though, it’s clear that the Russian government chose to stay one step ahead instead of waiting for the kindling flame to turn into a blaze. This is the evolution of the approach used a year and a half ago in Belarus, when it was enough for President Vladimir Putin to warn that Russian forces were ready to intervene if the worsening domestic situation required it. This time, Moscow skipped the warnings and jumped straight into action, probably thinking that the Kazakh government might not hold out on its own.
But the lines must not fade away completely. The important question now is whether or not deploying the CSTO peacekeepers would spell the end of clan rivalry in Kazakhstan, as manifested by the “transition of power,” and instead lead to consolidation of power (and in whose hands?). Moscow has every chance to benefit from this, as it will now have a military presence in the state, central to its policy as a guarantor, whose actions might determine how the situation will unfold. This is similar to what happened in Armenia after the 2020 war. It’s only a temporary solution, but it provides an effective set of tools for the near future.
This is the first time Russia is using an institution it controls to pursue its own political goals. Until now, it seemed that such structures were purely ornamental. It’s clear that the CSTO peacekeepers deployed to Kazakhstan will be made up mainly of Russian troops. First of all, that guarantees an effective response. Secondly, while Kazakhstan can agree to have Russian troops on its soil, Armenian or, say, Kyrgyz forces are absolutely out of the question. Still, using the coalition brand gives Moscow more opportunities and additionally justifies the existence of this alliance. Time will tell whether any other CSTO member states will face a Kazakh scenario, but the precedent has been set.
With Russia-US talks on security issues around the corner, this is a timely reminder that Moscow can make swift and unorthodox military and political decisions to influence the events in its sphere of interests. The larger this construct, the bigger the shouldered responsibility becomes, of course, including the responsibility for the developments in the countries where troubles are far from over. Of course, Moscow would have to deal with any fallout from these troubles anyway, and it’s easier to do so proactively and through a variety of tools at hand.
What is clear is that while branding the demonstrators foreign “terrorists” has allowed the Kazakh government to bring in heavyweight support from abroad, it has booted the conflict firmly into the international arena. It’s not yet clear what consequences this could have for the post-Soviet space, or for the world.
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