Moscow's military intervention in Crimea and the peninsula's upcoming March 16 referendum on whether to leave Ukraine and join Russia has caused muted official reaction in Central Asia. Nonetheless, Russia's actions in Ukraine is particularly closely followed across the region. And the Kremlin's justification for using force in Crimea--namely to protect ethnic Russians living there--has put Central Asian leaders on alert. In March, the foreign ministries of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan both issued carefully worded statements on Ukraine, expressing their concern but without mentioning Russia. "Kazakhstan is deeply concerned with the current developments in Ukraine," the Kazakhstani foreign ministry said. "Further escalation of tensions may lead to unpredictable consequences at both regional and global levels" (mfa.kz, March 3). According to Uzbekistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, events in Ukraine create "real threats to sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country [which] cannot but arouse a deep alarm and concern in Uzbekistan" (mfa.uz, March 4).
All five post-Soviet Central Asian republics--Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan--are home to varying numbers of ethnic Russians. Therefore, Moscow's rationale for troop deployments in a former Soviet republic to supposedly protect its Russian population could easily also be applied to any of the Central Asian states. The Kremlin seems to be setting just such a precedent in Ukraine by violating the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which provided security assurances to Kyiv in exchange for it giving up Soviet-era nuclear weapons deployed on Ukraine's territory (see EDM, March 10). Twenty years ago, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom provided such security assurances to Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan--requiring all to give up their Soviet nuclear stockpiles in exchange for assured territorial integrity and political independence.
Should Moscow's policy of violating its neighbors' sovereignty under the pretext of protecting Russians abroad expand beyond Russia's actions in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine now (see EDM, February 28, March 4), Kazakhstan would be a logical next target. It shares a common border with Russia, stretching over 7,591 kilometers (4,716 miles), the longest continuous land border in the world. And according to the last census, carried out in 2009, Kazakhstan's ethnic-Russian minority numbered 3,793,764 (23.7 percent of the total population).
Hence, on March 10, President Nursultan Nazarbayev surprised many when he told Russian President Vladimir Putin during a telephone conversation that Kazakhstan, "as a strategic partner [of Moscow], understands Russia's stance on the protection of the rights of national minorities in Ukraine and its security interests." Yet, he also called for a "peaceful regulation of the crisis in Ukraine on the basis of the preservation of Ukraine's sovereignty [within] the norms of international law" (akorda.kz, March 10).
| Bet the Kazaks and Ukrainians wish they'd kept their nuclear weapons... |