Central Asia Is Keeping a Nervous Eye on Russia’s War in Ukraine

 APRIL 26, 2022 LAST UPDATED 12:50 ET

Central Asia Is Keeping a Nervous Eye on Russia’s War in Ukraine

Jeffrey Mankoff Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is upending the geopolitical calculations of states around the world. The fallout is especially complex for the post-Soviet states of Central Asia, which maintain extensive economic, political, cultural and other ties to both Russia and Ukraine. While Central Asia is far from the front lines of the ongoing war, and therefore less directly impacted than states like Moldova or Georgia, its leaders also face difficult decisions.

Independent for three decades, the Central Asian states remain dependent to varying degrees on Russia as a security provider and economic partner, and as a source of political support. Their peoples and leaders, however, remain wary of Russia’s neo-imperial ambitions, which they fear will not remain confined to Ukraine. This combination of dependence and fear limits the Central Asian states’ freedom of maneuver. Central Asian elites largely oppose the war, which they worry could give Moscow a pretext to turn on them. With Russia likely facing a long period of isolation and sanctions, the Central Asian states will likely try to further reduce their economic and political dependence on Russia—without provoking a forceful response.

Despite their dependence on and vulnerability to Russia, Central Asian leaders have tried to distance themselves from the invasion of Ukraine. Central Asian leaders have either proclaimed neutrality or kept quiet about the war. All five states either abstained on or made sure to be absent for United Nations General Assembly votes to condemn the Russian invasion and demand protection for Ukrainian civilians, although Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan voted against Russia’s expulsion from the U.N. Human Rights Council. Leaders from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan also pushed back against Russian claims that they had endorsed the war in calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

On March 17, Uzbek Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Komilov, noted that Uzbekistan supported Ukraine’s territorial integrity and did not recognize the independence of the so-called Donetsk and Lugansk “people’s republics.” Kazakhstan, whose President Qasym-Jomart Tokayev called in support from the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, or CSTO, to deal with violent protests in Almaty as recently as January, similarly announced it would not recognize them. Despite crackdowns on civil society following the January unrest, Tokayev has allowed pro-Ukraine demonstrations and dispatched humanitarian assistance to Kyiv.

One of the more enduring consequences of the war for Central Asia may be the permanent paralysis or collapse of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, or EAEU, whose members include Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and which both Tajikistan and Uzbekistan had been debating joining before the outbreak of the war. EAEU membership now risks making the economies of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan collateral damage as many Western states impose restrictions on trade with and investment in Russia.

Despite Russian portrayals of the EAEU as a consensual, mutually beneficial organization, it has historically caused Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to raise tariffs on non-EAEU imports while lowering obstacles to Russian penetration of their economies. As a result, membership has increased Kazakhstan’s and Kyrgyzstan’s reliance on Russian imports, supply chains and project financing—all of which will be affected by the fallout from the war in Ukraine. Since the start of the war, business interests and civil society in both countries have pressed their governments to leave the EAEU, while discussions on joining the bloc in Tashkent and Dushanbe have been effectively suspended.

Leaders and peoples across Central Asia worry that Russia’s aggression against Ukraine could prove a harbinger of further attempts to seize territory.

Beyond the EAEU, the economic impact of the war on Russia will in turn have a direct impact in Central Asia. The World Bank projects that Russia’s economy could shrink 11.2 percent in 2022. That downturn will translate into a significant drop in remittances sent home by Central Asian migrant workers in Russia, which comprise more than a quarter of GDP in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, despite pandemic-related declines. Most of these remittances are, moreover, transmitted in rubles through Russian-based financial institutions. Sanctions that exacerbate exchange-rate volatility and cut off Russian banks from the dollar-denominated financial system represent an additional source of risk across Central Asia.

With sanctions on Russia likely to remain in place for the foreseeable future, the Central Asian states have an incentive to further diversify their economic ties. The most straightforward option is China, which has promised billions of dollars in additional investment to a region critical to its Belt and Road Initiative. Yet Beijing faces its own economic and political headwinds. Central Asian leaders have also grown increasingly worried about their growing dependence on China. The further weakening of Russia through sanctions and military setbacks will also make it harder for the Central Asian states to play Moscow and Beijing off one another, as they have done in the past several decades. This will especially be the case in the event Beijing decides to fully support Russia’s war effort, something it has refrained from doing so far.

Central Asia would benefit from more Western investment, but there are many obstacles to that happening. Central Asian energy could help the European Union wean itself from Russian oil and gas. Already, Europe’s interest in diversification has helped revive discussion of a long-planned trans-Caspian gas pipeline from Turkmenistan. However, the political and economic risks that derailed earlier efforts to bring Central Asian gas to Europe remain, and gas seems more likely to reach European shores from the Eastern Mediterranean or Iraq than from east of the Caspian Sea. Nor is the U.S. likely to be much help to the region. Central Asia’s economic ties with the U.S. have always been modest, while the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has made the region less of a strategic priority for Washington.

Depending on the war’s outcome and duration, Central Asia could find itself facing a much-altered geopolitical landscape in other ways as well. Though Russia has long viewed the former Soviet Union as a region where it maintains “privileged interests,” the invasion of Ukraine represents a sea change, with Moscow pivoting from attempts to shape the economic and political orientation of its neighbors—including limited territorial revision, such as the annexation of Crimea—to outright conquest. Leaders and peoples across the former Soviet Union worry that Russia’s aggression against Ukraine could prove a harbinger of further attempts to seize territory, whether as a result of hubris should its war in Ukraine succeed or in search of a consolation prize should it fail.

In Central Asia, such concerns are especially pronounced in Kazakhstan, which has a significant—if diminished—ethnic Russian population in the north, and which Russian imperial nationalists like the novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn have long pointed to as part of Russia’s “legitimate” patrimony. In 2014, Putin claimed that “Kazakhs never had any statehood” prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union—a remark that observers likened to his rejection of Ukraine’s historical legitimacy. Aggressive statements from Russian politicians since the start of the current war have only reinforced concerns about Russia’s intentions toward Kazakhstan. Nor is Moscow likely to forget Tokayev’s proclamation of neutrality, which came just weeks after Russian-led CSTO forces helped secure his hold on power.

Though Russia lacks close ethnic ties or a common border with the other Central Asian states, they too remain vulnerable to Russian aggression. Moscow maintains significant troop deployments in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan; hundreds of troops from Russia’s military base in Tajikistan were even sent to the front in Ukraine back in February. As recently as 2016, during the war in Afghanistan, Moscow also offered—or threatened—to deploy forces to Turkmenistan when it appeared Ashgabat was unable to secure the Turkmen-Afghan border. Leaders across the region recognize that, whatever happens in Ukraine, Russia will retain the capacity for military coercion—and that, should the worst happen, they are unlikely to receive the same outpouring of international support as Ukraine.

The Russian invasion is a tragedy above all for Ukraine and its people. For Central Asia, the war creates unwelcome pressure to take sides, along with economic consequences likely to outlast the fighting in Ukraine. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Central Asian states’ challenge has centered on consolidating their sovereignty and independence in a volatile region lying between a former imperial hegemon in Russia and an emerging economic titan in China. Having succeeded to varying degrees in that endeavor, the Central Asian states now face new dangers. With Russia facing isolation and accelerated economic decline, Central Asia has more reason than ever to accelerate its decoupling from Moscow. Yet wariness about provoking Russian retaliation, coupled with the absence of immediate alternatives, will continue to force caution on the region.

Jeffrey Mankoff is a distinguished research fellow at the U.S. National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies and the author of the forthcoming book, “Empires of Eurasia: How Imperial Legacies Shape International Security.”

WPR