Ukraine war: Is Kazakhstan going cool on Russia?

Last Friday, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev looked cornered when he sat next to his Russian colleague, Vladimir Putin, and Margarita Simonyan, Head of the RT Television Network funded by Kremlin, who was approved in the West.

The three are on the main stage of the International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg, the former capital of the Russian Empire and the hometown of Putin.

Simonyan asked the leader of Kazakh about “inevitable” and “legality” of what has been dubbed the special operation” of Kremlin in Ukraine – the biggest armed conflict in Europe since World War II.

There is a different opinion about it,” Tokayev, former Foreign Minister Kazakhstan and former Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations, began diplomatically.

For about two minutes, he reflects on international law, the UN Charter and the “incompatibility” of the right to territorial integrity and self -determination.

If the right to determine its own fate is applied throughout the world, there will be more than 600 countries instead of 193 states that are currently members of the United Nations. Of course, it will be chaos, “Tokayev said.And then he said something that seemed to have destroyed the “strategic partnership” post-Soviet Kazakhstan with his former Master of his empire.

That is why we will not recognize Taiwan, Kosovo, [Georgia’s area of separating from] southern Ossetia and Abkhazia, “Tokayev said with a faint smile.

Apparently, the same principle will be applied to the quasi-country territory, in our view, Luhanansk nd Donetsk,” two regions that separate themselves in Southeast Ukraine, he said.

Both regions separated themselves in 2014 with Moscow’s military and financial support in a war that killed more than 13,000 people and revoked millions of people.But Kremlin recognized their independence” only almost eight years later, on February 22, two days before attacking the right Ukraine.

A member of the Russian Parliament said Tokayev “challenged” Putin – and hinted that Moscow could attack the northern region of Kazakhstan, which has a large Russian ethnic population.

There are many cities with the dominant Russian population that have nothing to do with what is called Kazakhstan,” Constantin Zatulin told Moskva Radio.

I want Astana [the old name of the capital of Kazakh, Nur-Sultan] not to forget that our friends and partners do not raise territorial problems and do not debate. With the rest – like, for example, with Ukraine – everything is possible, “he said.And many people in Ukraine sees Tokayev’s Spiel as a brave statement that indicates the “sunset” from the political, economic and military blocks led by Moscow in the former Soviet Union which includes Kazakhstan.

Kyiv records the courage of Tokayev, who can say words like that on Putin’s face,” Analyst based in Kyiv, Aleksey Kushch told Al Jazeera.

He said the Russian-Ukraine War and crime committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine caused Moscow to lose influence in Kazakhstan and four “stans” left from the Soviet Former Central Asia.