WAR OF AGGRESSION AGAINST UKRAINE CAUSING A SPLIT BETWEEN RUSSIA AND KAZAKHSTAN

Before Putin launched his war of aggression in the Ukraine, one of his most important allies was the large central Asian state of Kazakhstan, but now it seems the war and Putin's attempt to arbitrarily redraw national borders using military force is causing serious problems between the two states. 

The Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has been vocal in support of Ukraine. In June, at the plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Tokayev directly criticised Putin's tactic of creating fake breakaway states.

As reported by Bloomberg:

After Putin argued he was protecting Russian-speakers in the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk peoples’ republics of eastern Ukraine, which Russia had recognized as independent days before the invasion, moderator Margarita Simonyan, head of the Kremlin-funded RT TV, pressed Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev on whether he supported Russia’s view.

He didn’t.

Kazakhstan doesn’t recognize “quasi-state territories which, in our view, is what Luhansk and Donetsk are,” Tokayev said. There’d be “chaos” in the world if hundreds of new countries emerged, even as there is a conflict between the legal principles of territorial integrity of states and the right of people living in them to self-determination, he said.

Now, it looks like the division between Putin and Tokayev is escalating, with Kazakhstan seeking alternatives to Russian pipelines to export its oil to the West.

As reported by The Diplomat:

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev called diversification of oil export routes, particularly the Trans-Caspian option, a “priority” in a government meeting on July 7. Although Tokayev did not mention Russia directly, the comments came days after a Russian court ordered a suspension of operations at Novorossiysk, the Russian port that handles the majority of Kazakhstan’s oil exports.[...]

Tokayev’s urging that the “priority direction” for oil diversification is the Trans-Caspian route resurrects the efforts of his predecessor, Nursultan Nazarbayev, to transport more oil across the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan and onward to Europe. In 2006, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan signed a framework agreement on a trans-Caspian oil transport system, though that left open the details of whether the envisioned system would include a seabed pipeline or increased tanker transport. By 2009, state energy companies in both countries agreed to carry out further feasibility studies and during a visit by Nazarbayev to France, the then-Kazakh president heralded the “French side’s participation in the project to construct the main export oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea to Baku and Europe.”

Of course, what is not being said yet is that large parts of Kazakhstan are still inhabited by ethnic Russians, and Kazakhstan could quite easily suffer a similar fate as the Ukraine with Putin supporting breakaway "quasi-state territories" if it suited him. In other words, Kazakhstan has every reason to want Ukraine to win its defensive war against Putin.