Putin acts through the CSTO to defend his interests in Kazakhstan

The Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), the post-Soviet bloc's military alliance led by Russia and including Belarus and Armenia, will hold an emergency meeting on Monday to address the unrest in Kazakhstan, one of the organisation's six members. A series of violent riots in the Central Asian country last week left more than 160 people dead and 1,300 injured, according to official figures. This has set off alarm bells in the region.

The meeting will be attended by all the members of the bloc, including Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and will take place via videoconference under the chairmanship of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. However, it will be Vladimir Putin who will take the lead in a crisis where Moscow has many issues to resolve and too many open fronts. Russia is also the organisation's main supporter and its most powerful member.

The CSTO, founded after the collapse of the USSR and last renewed in 2002, had not yet made any intervention until Kazakh President Kasim-Yomart Tokayev called on its partners at the dawn of the crisis. Tokayev himself asked his Russian counterpart to send troops to quell the riots, and Russia responded with a contingent of 2,500 soldiers. This action was also backed by Pashinyan himself and Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko.

The Russian Defence Ministry confirmed on Sunday the presence of its troops in Almaty, the economic and cultural centre of the country that served as its capital, although it did not specify the number of troops deployed on the ground. Moscow assured that the contingent would be fully operational and that for the time being it would be responsible for defending key positions and infrastructures such as the airport and government buildings. Facilities razed to the ground by protesters.

The outbreak of protests has highlighted the power struggle between the current president and his predecessor Nursultan Nazarbayev. The "father of the fatherland" and former member of the CPSU, after whom the capital is named, has held power in Kazakhstan for more than three decades since the death throes of the Soviet Union. And he heads a regime in which his inner core monopolises the country's resources.

Until recently, Tokayev himself was part of this privileged circle. In 2019, in fact, Nazarbayev relinquished the presidency to him voluntarily and was relegated as head of the National Security Council. A position from which he could pull the strings without being so exposed to criticism. However, the current president's moves raised hackles in the Palace, until a series of violent riots broke out in the country that put the authorities on the ropes.

With the arrests of profiles close to the former president, Tokayev indirectly points the finger at his political mentor as a promoter of the protests. So much so that the president dismissed Nazarbayev as head of the National Security Council once the uprisings began. In this regard, the Kazakh authorities revealed the arrest of Karim Masimov, the longest-serving head of government during the presidency of the "founder of the nation".

The demonstrations, which began in one location in the far west of the country over the exponential rise in the price of liquefied gas, quickly spread to affect the two main cities of Almaty and the capital, Nur-sultan. Cars reduced to ashes, government facilities destroyed and the appearance of armed groups marked the development of the protests, whose last pockets of violence seem to be subsiding.

It is not yet known whether the protests were organised or not and what specific profiles they were made up of. But all of them coincided in wanting to overthrow the current regime, characterised by rampant corruption and an oligarchy that concentrates the country's vast energy resources for itself.

"The protesters have demonstrated professional skills," the authorities said, adding that they had used radios to coordinate their actions. The president's line of argument is that the protests are the work of a group of more than 20,000 terrorists, whose organisation is the result of foreign interference. He also points to figures close to the former president as being involved in the unrest. The Interior Ministry has so far counted some 6,000 arrests.

Putin seems to have seen an opportunity amid the chaos to regain lost influence in his own backyard. The presence of pro-Western groups in the unrest, similar to those in Ukraine during the Euromaidan revolution, as well as the incidence of supporters of a rapprochement with Turkey, have unsettled a Kremlin that has seen its relationship with Kazakh ruling elites slipping to the detriment of actors such as China.

For this reason, the Russian leader has opted to reinforce a weakened Tokayev at the helm of Kazakhstan, who has requested Moscow's backing from the outset. This explains the rapid dispatch of troops and the recent declarations of the Russian ambassador to the Central Asian country, Alexei Borodavkin, who threatened the Kazakh regime's detractors and assured that "the Russia of today is not the Russia of the 1990s". Quite a declaration of intent.