Vladimir Putin left what appears to have been a veiled threat to the president of Kazakhstan at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum on Friday: All the countries of the former Soviet Union are “historic Russia,” suggesting that any one of them could be the target of a Ukraine-like invasion.
This was the reaction of the Russian president when Kassym-Jomart Tokayev considered that Donetsk and Lugansk, pro-Russian regions in eastern Ukraine that make up Donbass, were not independent states, nor were they under the Kremlin: they are “territories of quasi-states”, classified the Kazakh head of state.
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On the same stage as Tokayev, Vladimir Putin rolled his eyes, pursed his lips and fired: “What is the Soviet Union? It is historical Russia.”. After praising Kazakhstan as a “brother” country, he continued: “The same thing could have happened to Ukraine, no doubt. But they didn’t want to be our allies.”
An expert based in Nur-Sultan (capital of Kazakhstan) considered in an interview with The Telegraph that the Russian president, feeling “humiliated” by his counterpart, “It makes it clear that Kazakhstan could be Russia’s next prey.”
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Another expert, also Kazakh, says that Putin considers the country a “good neighbor”, but translated the Russian president’s message as follows: “If you cross the line and go west, we can conquer your land. because it’s ours.”
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Maximilian Hess of the Foreign Policy Research Institute also interpreted Putin’s reaction as a “clear threat.” Dimash Alzhanov, a Kazakh political analyst, told The Telegraph that the country is “already firmly entrenched in the Russian domain of influence”, so “Putin does not need to reimpose the borders of the Soviet Union to control it“.
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Source: Observadora
