Moscow’s traditional allies in Central Asia are quietly making moves that are likely to upset the Russian leader.
“Good ties with neighbours guarantee safety,” Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, a former foreign minister known for his negotiating skills, said on Tuesday. But what he went on to say may seriously strain Kazakhstan’s ties with its giant northern neighbour and former imperial master “Here Mre Link.”
Tokayev instructed his government to help tens of thousands of Russian men that flooded his nation because of the chaotic and massive partial military mobilisation for the war in Ukraine.
Almost 100,000 Russians have entered Kazakhstan since September 21, when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the mobilisation, the Kazakh interior ministry said on Tuesday.
“Most of them have to leave because of the hopeless situation. We have to take care of them and secure their safety,” Tokayev said. Ex-Soviet and mostly Muslim Central Asia has been a major source of labour migrants to Russia for decades.
Some have reported facing xenophobia in Russia and complained about the practices of Russian police and their employers.
Central Asia is also still home to various numbers of ethnic Russians whose forefathers migrated in the Soviet era as communist Moscow tried to develop the region.
These days, Central Asian governments allow the new wave of Russians – but fall short of supporting or denouncing the Ukraine war.
Moscow’s traditional allies in Central Asia are quietly making moves that are likely to upset the Russian leader.
“Good ties with neighbours guarantee safety,” Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, a former foreign minister known for his negotiating skills, said on Tuesday. But what he went on to say may seriously strain Kazakhstan’s ties with its giant northern neighbour and former imperial master.
Tokayev instructed his government to help tens of thousands of Russian men that flooded his nation because of the chaotic and massive partial military mobilisation for the war in Ukraine.
Almost 100,000 Russians have entered Kazakhstan since September 21, when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the mobilisation, the Kazakh interior ministry said on Tuesday.
“Most of them have to leave because of the hopeless situation. We have to take care of them and secure their safety,” Tokayev said. Ex-Soviet and mostly Muslim Central Asia has been a major source of labour migrants to Russia for decades.
Some have reported facing xenophobia in Russia and complained about the practices of Russian police and their employers.
Central Asia is also still home to various numbers of ethnic Russians whose forefathers migrated in the Soviet era as communist Moscow tried to develop the region.
These days, Central Asian governments allow the new wave of Russians – but fall short of supporting or denouncing the Ukraine war.
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Plane tickets are next to impossible to get.
“We only got a train ticket to Kyzylorda,” the father of a university graduate from Moscow, who may be drafted, told Al Jazeera, referring to the southern Kazakh city.
Hotels, hostels and private housing in northern Kazakhstan have been so jam-packed that the owner of a movie theatre in the border city of Oral made headlines after letting homeless Russians sleep on the premises free of charge.
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And the newcomers are easy to spot.
“They’re everywhere. You can tell them by the accent, by the way they look around,” Boris Nepomnyashchiy, a software developer in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s financial capital and largest city, told Al Jazeera.
Even though Kazakhstan has the largest share of the ethnic Russian population in Central Asia, most of the newcomers see it as a temporary shelter until they find plane tickets to other nations.
Western sanctions curbed the number of airlines working in Russia – and skyrocketed ticket prices.
“The possibility of using our sky harbours by Russians for their relocation is one of the reasons the immigrants are coming,” migration official Aslan Atalykov reportedly said.
Two-thirds of the 100,000 newcomers have already left, and only about 8,000 received a taxpayer’s code necessary for opening a bank account or getting a temporary residence permit, the Orda.kz website reported, quoting Ministry of Internal Affairs data.
Some flee to Uzbekistan, Central Asia’s most populous nation that lies south of Kazakhstan – and desperately look for accommodation.
“I can’t handle the influx,” said Timur Karpov, who owns an art gallery in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, and has been helping dozens of Russians who left after the war in Ukraine began.
Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has neither supported nor denounced the war.
He fired Abdulaziz Komilov, his foreign minister who in March said that Tashkent does not recognise the separatist statelets.
But ultimately, no Central Asian nation has recognised the self-described people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.
“Tashkent is silent so far. Which denotes the super-cautiousness of Mirziyayev, his fear of damaging ties with Moscow,” Alisher Ilkhamov, the Uzbekistan-born director of Due Diligence Central Asia, a think-tank in London, told Al Jazeera.
“This borders on cowardice and a lack of principles in how he builds his foreign policies,” he said
