The National Interest
Why Kazakhstan May Be Vladimir Putin’s Next Target
January 8, 2026
By: Adam Dixon
Even if it emerges victorious in Ukraine, Russia can still sow the seeds of a future war of expansion in Central Asia.
The claim at the recent press conference with President Donald Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky that peace in the Ukraine War had now been “90–95 percent achieved” struck objective analysts as already wishful thinking. However, President Trump then rocketed into the stratosphere of surreal nonsense by stating repeatedly that “Russia wants Ukraine to succeed.”
In contrast to the pro-Russia voices in the White House, President Kassym-Jomaert Tokayev of Kazakhstan is one observer whose feet are firmly on the ground. He understands the political, ideological, and economic realities with which the Kremlin is dealing. Tokayev is keenly aware that these realities could have a direct impact on the future of his country, because some of the reasons Russian president Vladimir Putin cited for launching the Ukrainian war could also apply to Kazakhstan.
The first reality is that the leaders of autocracies are almost invariably focused on their own interests and those of their closest supporters, not on those of their country. Personal prestige, no matter how spurious, and personal wealth, no matter how ill-gotten, eclipse most other concerns. Unless an autocrat is perceived by his subjects as anointed by God, he (most autocrats have been men) has one fundamental need to maintain his position: the image of power.
This makes him implacably opposed to any rival institutions that could command respect, loyalty, or wealth— elected legislatures, non-aligned churches and religious hierarchies, civil society, academia, a free press, even the entertainment industry. To co-opt the elites of business, the justice system, the security services, and the military, the leader must constantly demonstrate his power. The moment the would-be czar shows weakness or failure, the whole structure begins to teeter.
The second reality is that an aggressive, resentful nationalism has become the tiger of choice for Putin’s ride in power. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, followed by Russia’s decade-long attempt to become a democracy, produced social and economic chaos. At the start of the new millennium, Putin astutely manipulated the resulting widespread sense of disorientation, grievance, and wounded pride to establish himself as the leader who could restore stability, prosperity, and a sense of greatness. He presented Russia’s difficulties and failures as due not to the inherent complexity of establishing democratic institutions where they have not previously existed, but to the deceit, malice, and greed of the West, intent on dismembering and colonizing Holy Mother Russia.
The third reality is that a critical source of the illusion of a recovered greatness is the spectacle of military successes on foreign stages, even if these are achieved against much weaker opponents: Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and francophone Africa. The assertion of control over Ukraine was meant to be the piece de resistance of this restoration of international “respect,” bringing Russia not just enormous agricultural and mineral wealth but also the satisfaction of humiliating the EU and the United States.
The Kremlin anticipated that the West, cowardly and impotent, would merely watch, shrug glumly, and return to “business as usual.” Had Russia attempted to seize Ukraine back in 2014, it might have succeeded militarily at least in the short term. Yet by 2022, Ukraine, with the help of Western military cooperation, had become a different nut and had surprised the world by refusing to crack.
Kazakhstan understands further that these three realities have created several serious problems.
First, Putin’s personal fate depends on avoiding a perceived defeat and on satisfying nationalist fervor to assert de facto control over most of the territories of the imperial and Soviet past.
Second, Russia has been shifted into a war economy that cannot return to a focus on civilian consumers.
Third, an army of roughly 1.2 million men, many of them stunted from birth by the blight and neglect of rural poverty, and now further ravaged by the severe and inescapable psychological damage of modern warfare, cannot easily return home as “triumphant heroes.”
The “common sense” view is that Russia is sufficiently depleted economically and demographically that it cannot open a “second front” in the Baltics or Central Asia. Western analysts, as well as senior Russian officials, have been predicting a collapse from exhaustion for over a year. The fact that Russia continues with a range of hostile activities—political subversion in European elections, covert attacks on key infrastructure such as undersea cables, “accidental” violations of neighboring territory or airspace, to name only a few—should cause some “cognitive dissonance” regarding the imminence of peace.
The Kazakh interpretation is calm and objective: weighing against the logic of “Russia has expended vast wealth, has killed, wounded and displaced millions, has created trauma that will last for generations—it is time for it to admit a mistake, and call a halt to this war” is the potent logic of the tyrant: “Any step back from my maximum demands is an impossible admission of weakness. If I cannot win this war, then I need another that I can.” This is the threat that has been implicit for over a decade but is now becoming more explicit: weakened in Ukraine, Putin needs a more achievable target, and Kazakhstan could be that target.
The Kazakh historical experience has been in important ways similar to that of Ukraine. In the course of the nineteenth century, Russia annexed and conquered the territory of what is now Kazakhstan. Russian immigrants occupied or seized fertile land and scarce water resources in the northern border areas, pushing Kazakhs into more marginal, arid, and semi-desert territories. In the twentieth century, Joseph Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture led to widespread famine and massive loss of life, paralleling the Ukrainian “Holodomor.” Kazakh political and cultural elites were repressed and liquidated, with even their wives sent to concentration camps.
Many of the same Russian motivations, both stated and unstated, for invading Ukraine in February 2022 also hold true in Kazakhstan. The former include the “mistreatment” of the ethnically Russian minority (which in both countries is roughly 18 percent of the total population), the “gift” of Russian investments into agricultural and industrial infrastructure for which Russia does not feel it has been properly compensated, and the existence of prestigious Soviet-era projects such as the Baikonur Cosmodrome and spaceport facility on Kazakh territory.
Furthermore, echoing its condescending rhetoric about the regime in Kyiv, Russia has cast doubt on Kazakhstan’s legitimacy as a nation-state, suggesting that its government is an artifact of its history within the Soviet Empire and has survived only because of Moscow’s indulgence. Astana’s refusal to categorically support the “Special Military Operation” is perceived in Moscow as “disloyal.”
The unstated motivations, which align with neo-colonialist thinking elsewhere in the world, are that Kazakhstan has vast mineral resources, including fossil fuels, uranium, precious metals, and the third-largest proven reserves of rare earths in the world, as well as agricultural wealth. It’s easy to see why Russia would want to control these riches.
In January of 2022, when the impending full-scale invasion of Ukraine was already more than a gleam in Putin’s eye, unrest broke out in Kazakhstan, prompted by higher fuel prices and dissatisfaction with the lack of social and political reform. As in Russia, ownership of the national wealth is dominated by a small group of oligarchs. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev felt obliged to appeal to the CTSO (Collective Security Treaty Organization—Russia’s version of NATO) for assistance. Russia duly dispatched troops to restore order, enabling President Putin to demonstrate in front of his domestic audience that Russia still determines who remains in power in Central Asia—a “spectacle” of control.
Putin vowed to prevent “color revolutions,” threats from Islamist groups, and further interference from “malign foreign agents.” However, implicit in such “support” for the legitimate leadership was that any significant shift toward policies (or towards new political figures) that were not aligned with Moscow would be “unwelcome.” Moscow, in short, wanted and expected that it had ensured a compliant leadership in Astana, which would confirm its vassal status by continuing to rely on Russian transportation networks (railroads and pipelines) for Kazakh trade, by providing diplomatic support with regard to the war in Ukraine, and by helping Russia to evade sanctions.
Russia’s status as a pariah state internationally, as well as its increasing reliance on Chinese support to maintain its war machine, have therefore presented Kazakhstan with both an opportunity and a risk. On the one hand, it can diversify its routes to market by developing deeper ties to China, which might then stand to some degree as a protector. On the other hand, this may risk further antagonizing Putin, who not only resents losing any economic leverage but also will feel compelled to demonstrate his power if he emerges weakened and diminished from the conflict with Ukraine.
Kazakhstan’s studied neutrality has therefore been augmented by the assiduous pursuit of a “multi-vector” diplomacy with new partners, cultivating trade with the United States and the EU, as well as with the Organization of Turkish States (OTS), of which it was a founding member. However, the critical partner is China, which is ravenous for new energy resources, agricultural goods, and raw materials.
Although popular opinion in Kazakhstan is wary of exchanging one regional hegemon for another, and resents many Chinese attitudes and policies, there has been a significant effort in the last two years to step up efforts to develop the “Middle Corridor,” the multimodal (rail, road and marine) transportation system which cuts 1200–1800 miles off of the Russian Trans-Siberian route. The Middle Corridor will ultimately increase Kazakh capacity not just to China, but also westwards from Aktau across the Caspian, and on to the Black Sea.
For the time being, however, Russia’s domination of the transportation system connecting Kazakhstan to the outside world remains overwhelming. Kazakhstan’s largest oil export pipelines, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), which carries 80 percent of the total, terminates at Novorossiysk, and the Atyrau-Samara pipeline carries roughly 13 percent. By contrast, the two non-Russian routes, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) to a Turkish port on the Black Sea, takes 2 percent, and the Atasu-Alashankou pipeline, which flows eastwards to China, takes another 2 percent.
The last of these, which has a design capacity of 20 million tons (ten times the current volumes), is now being expanded. Ukrainian drone strikes on Novorossiysk, which crippled the loading facilities for Kazakh oil exports, have justified the diversification of routes and development of alternatives, but have heightened Russia’s awareness that its control is slipping.
Militarily, Russia dwarfs Kazakhstan in both manpower and equipment. The flat, dry steppe offers no natural obstacles along the border (the longest continuous border between any two countries in the world). Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, in contrast to Kyiv, is indefensible. Russia has a plethora of military bases scattered along the length of this border to provide access points and logistical hubs. Now caught in the trap of his own making, Putin cannot halt the Russian nationalist juggernaut, nor reorient his military-industrial complex, nor welcome his troops home. For these reasons, a conflict to reassert control over Kazakhstan may seem preferable to a further escalation with NATO.
The question, therefore, is Putin’s calculus of the costs and benefits of attempting to subordinate Kazakhstan if that means challenging its emerging patron, China. It would seem obvious that Putin cannot antagonize China, which has played such a crucial role in his war effort against Ukraine. Still, it was equally obvious that invading Ukraine was a perilous project, to the point that most experts in both Russia and the West believed it wouldn’t happen. China’s interests, attention, and ambitions are divided: the main ones, listed in no particular order, include Taiwan, Siberia, Central Asia, access to new Arctic shipping routes, and competing with the United States in world affairs.
In the new world of “spheres of influence” and “might makes right,” geopolitical opportunities and realities will be recalculated daily, and relative benefits reassessed. Kazakhstan clearly understands the problems Putin now faces and that it is the single most attractive target for any follow-on or alternative war that Putin may decide is a personal necessity. President Tokayev can only do his best to play a long game of chess while the increasing turmoil plays out.
The White House pretends that it neither understands the nature of a criminal megalomaniac, nor how a police state can run amok, nor how a rabid nationalist movement can escape the control of those who nurtured it, nor how a bogus “Potemkin” Christianity can savage innocent victims. It does, however, understand that military adventures can be successful theatrical distractions, and has confirmed that it accepts them as a new international norm.
In 1909, Russian ballet patron Sergei Diaghilev launched the extraordinary, groundbreaking “Ballets Russes” in Paris, a spectacle that established Imperial Russia as a protean source of inspiration for modern music, art, dance, choreography, fashion, and set design—and shaped European and American artistic sensibilities for decades. The vastness of Russia was suddenly matched by a greatness of imagination and spirit from which all could benefit.
This throws a spotlight on a crucial question that is too little asked in a world suddenly consumed by “transactional diplomacy” and the projection of “hard power” into “spheres of influence”: what is it that Russia is bringing to its neighbors, and by extension, to the world? Is it able to offer scientific, technological, artistic, or cultural achievements? Or just a blind, malignant desire to dominate and destroy?
Watching the catastrophe in Ukraine unfold, Kazakhstan is under no illusions: Diaghilev is dead.
About the Author: Adam Dixon
Adam Dixon has extensive experience in Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union as a consultant, businessman, and entrepreneur, working mostly in aviation and telecommunications, and is currently developing a range of innovative military technologies, including a platform for landmine removal. Mr. Dixon studied at Harvard (BA 1983), Oxford (MPhil 1988), and Leningrad State University (1986).
