Alexander Thompson: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan open the door a little wider to Ukraine

On September 23 at the UN General Assembly, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev became the first Central Asian leader since the start of the war in 2022 to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Three days later, also in New York, Uzbek Foreign Minister Bakhtiyor Saidov met with his Ukrainian counterpart Andrii Sybiha. The countries’ top diplomats last met it 2021.

“All of this speaks to the fact that, if we take Uzbekistan for example, it is striving to express a more firmly independent position regardless of the very serious pressure applied by Russia,” said Farhod Tolipov, the director of Knowledge Caravan, a Tashkent-based think tank.

At the same time, the meetings bear no indications Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan plan to abandon neutrality or openly defy the Kremlin.

Some experts believe Tokayev may be trying to position Kazakhstan as a facilitator of peace talks between Russian and Ukrainian officials. “This meeting might be a turning point for Kazakhstan as a visible negotiator at the global level,” Nurbolat Nyshanbayev, a foreign policy expert at TuranUniversity in Almaty, said, referring to the Tokayev-Zelensky meeting.

In a Fox News interview after meeting Tokayev, Zelensky said he would be open to talks with Putin in various countries, including Kazakhstan.

“Though not a mediator, Kazakhstan nonetheless would be ready, if the need arose, to provide friendly services as a place for negotiations and meetings on all levels,” Tokayev said in response to Zelensky’s statements, Kazakhstan’s Tengri news reported.

Tokayev’s discussions with Zelensky, per the official Akorda readout, focused on economic and humanitarian cooperation. Zelensky “shared his view” on the situation in Ukraine, and Tokayev told the Ukrainian leader that “diplomatic work must continue to search for paths toward an end to the conflict,” according to the Kazakh readout.

The Ukrainian side went further in its account of the meeting, saying in a readout that the pair discussed peace efforts “in depth” and that “Tokayev assured of Kazakhstan’s full support for Ukraine and stressed the importance of achieving peace as soon as possible.”

Nyshanbayev also believes the two leaders talked about Ukrainian drone attacks on Caspian Pipeline Consortium infrastructure in Russia. The CPC route carries 80 percent of Kazakh oil to Europe. A Ukrainian drone strike on September 24 caused damage to CPC facilities at Novorossiysk, a key oil export terminal.

Since the start of the conflict, Tokayev has been perhaps the Central Asian leader most willing to pursue neutral policies that displease the Kremlin. For example, in June 2022, the Kazakh president asserted that Astana would not recognize the Moscow-backed separatists in the Donbas region of Ukraine. Even so, Kazakhstan has come under suspicion in the past for serving as a back door for sanctions-busting imports by Russia.

Officials and observers in Uzbekistan have been a bit more candid about Tashkent’s stepped up engagement with Ukraine. Uzbekistan is always looking to maximize trade and investment opportunities, Saidov, the Uzbek foreign minister, stated on his Telegram channel.

Uzbekistan and other Central Asian states’ neutral stance on the war, like their abstentions or absences in UN votes, has been criticized as tilting toward Moscow, said Tolipov, the think-tank expert.

“To smooth out a little this slant … we probably needed to create this image or this message with the New York meeting,” he told Eurasianet.

Uzbekistan has distanced itself from Russia in other ways. In recent months, Tashkent has cracked down on Uzbek mercenaries who have signed up to fight for Russia in Ukraine. In the most recent prosecution, a man convicted of mercenary activity and another offense received a three-year prison sentence in mid-October. Meanwhile a crackdown on Central Asian labor migrants by Russian authorities and repeated incidents of violence and xenophobia against Uzbeks in Russia has emerged as a major point of tension in Uzbek-Russian relations.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is intent on seizing the diplomatic opportunity to improve ties with Central Asian states, underscored by the establishment of a new section devoted to the region within Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“[The war] should create stronger relations between Central Asia and Ukraine,” Nyshanbayev said. “There [were] historical relations ‘post-Soviet states’ style, but I think now is the time for just state-to-state sovereign relations between Ukraine and other countries with a new vision.”