Russian Expert On Turkey Starobudtsev: Russia Outflanked Turkey With Its Intervention In Kazakhstan, But The Competition Between The Two Claimants To The Turkic Parts Of The Post-Soviet Space Will Continue

Russia had congratulated itself on its textbook intervention to quell the unrest in Kazakstan but recriminations began when Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, arguably the main beneficiary of the intervention, appointed Askar Umarov minister of information in the new government. Umarov is accused of besmirching Russia’s Great Patriotic War (World War II) and has called the Russians living in Kazakhstan an imposed Diaspora. Yevgeny Primakov, head of Rossotrudnichestvo [Federal Agency for the CIS Affairs, Compatriots Living Abroad, and International Humanitarian Cooperation], refused to work with the Kazakh official. Primakov charges Umarov with having Russophobic views. “I would like to remind you of by now an old, automatically operative and proven rule. It states that Rossotrudnichestvo doesn’t maintain contacts, doesn’t work and doesn’t cooperate with Russophobic trash,” stressed Primakov. Back in 2017, the ‘Kazinform’ agency, headed by Umarov, published a ‘Great Kazakhstan’ map, which designated the Russian cities of Omsk and Orenburg as a part of Great Kazakhstan.[1]