PSCRP-BESA Reports No 157 (October 6, 2025)
When a former U.S. ambassador says Washington has effectively abandoned Central Asia to Russia and China, it’s not idle chatter. Daniel Rosenblum, who served as ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2019 to 2022 and to Kazakhstan from 2022 until earlier this year, warned that the United States has pulled back so far from the region’s information space that Moscow and Beijing now shape the narrative almost unchallenged. In practical terms, this means one thing: the story Central Asians hear about themselves, their neighbors, and the wider world is written by powers that view them less as partners than as vassals.
That retreat has consequences. Western absence leaves countries like Kazakhstan to fend off Moscow’s neo-imperial ambitions without a counterweight, offering Russia the advantage of presenting itself as the natural arbiter of Central Asian affairs. And while Astana has proven adept at balancing over the years, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed the limits of tightrope diplomacy. Kazakhstan now finds itself cornered — pulled into sanction circumvention by sheer economic gravity, yet punished by the risk of Western backlash. It is the kind of dilemma only created when bigger players walk off the board.
Kazakhstan Between Survival and Compromise
Kazakhstan’s predicament is unenviable. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine shattered the fragile balance it had maintained between East and West. Suddenly, neutrality became harder to sustain. Kazakhstan’s political and economic ties to Russia are deep, unavoidable, and in some cases coercive.
Sanctions evasion illustrates the trap. On the surface, facilitating parallel imports or gray-zone trade looks like easy money. For Kazakhstan, however, it is also an offer that cannot be refused. Its economy is entwined with Russia’s, from pipelines to financial flows. This makes Astana vulnerable to secondary sanctions, dragging it deeper into Moscow’s embrace even as it risks Western punishment. Refusing such economic engagement would devastate local industries and impoverish ordinary Kazakhs — fuel for political instability in a region where fragility is contagious.
The rational solution is not blanket pressure, but precision. Any sanctions, which seems like an easy solution, should be laser-sharp, leaving space for legitimate commerce. Equally crucial is to open Western markets to Kazakh goods and attract Western investment. Stability will come not from isolation, but from integration.
The Turkic Alternative
For Kazakhstan, survival cannot rest on defensive maneuvering alone. Building alternative frameworks of cooperation is critical, and one of the most promising avenues lies in Turkic integration. The Organization of Turkic States (OTS) — bringing together Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, and Turkey — has quietly transformed from a cultural talking shop into a geopolitical platform. It offers Kazakhstan not only economic diversification, but also a new form of collective identity that dilutes Moscow’s monopoly on influence in the region.
Turkic cooperation gives Astana something it has long lacked: a community of states that understand both the constraints of geography and the pull of history. For Central Asia, it opens trade corridors that bypass Russia, strengthens collective bargaining power with China, and provides access to Turkey’s NATO connections without forcing an all-or-nothing choice between East and West.
But there’s a subtler dimension. For Turkic minorities inside Russia — Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvash, and others — the OTS creates an external reference point beyond Moscow’s narrative of “Russian civilization.” It doesn’t mean secession or open defiance, but it does mean exposure to new models of governance, culture, and self-expression that Moscow cannot fully control. In the long run, that could chip away at the Kremlin’s claim to speak unchallenged on behalf of all non-Russian peoples under its flag.
This isn’t to say Turkic integration is a magic wand. The Central Asian republics still compete with one another, and Turkey’s ambitions sometimes raise eyebrows. Yet compared to the dead-end dependency on Moscow, it is a positive-sum project. It creates a gravitational pull of its own—one that makes the region less susceptible to Russian coercion and more confident in articulating a future on its own terms.
Diversifying Away From Moscow
Symbolism matters, but so do barrels of oil. Kazakhstan has started probing alternatives to Russian-controlled export routes, experimenting with new outlets and suppliers. The volumes involved so far are modest, but that almost misses the point. Every barrel of crude that leaves Kazakh territory without crossing Russian pipelines is a statement: Astana is unwilling to remain hostage to Moscow’s infrastructure stranglehold.
Oil is Kazakhstan’s lifeline. Roughly two-thirds of its crude has historically been exported through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), which runs directly to Russia’s Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. That dependency gives the Kremlin a dangerous lever: one “technical inspection” or “environmental check” can suddenly halt flows, depriving Kazakhstan of billions in revenue. This is not hypothetical — Moscow has used these tactics before, shutting or slowing the CPC under pretexts that coincided suspiciously with political tensions.
By exploring alternative routes, Kazakhstan is buying insurance against such coercion. The so-called Trans-Caspian corridor — shipping oil across the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan, and from there via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline to Turkey — offers a non-Russian path to global markets.
Of course, the alternatives cannot fully replace Russian routes overnight. Costs are higher, capacity is limited, and building new infrastructure takes years. But in geopolitics, signaling matters almost as much as volume. For investors and partners, diversification signals that Kazakhstan is not resigned to being Moscow’s captive. For Russia, it shows that every act of pressure risks accelerating the erosion of its dominance.
Over time, this diversification could reshape the region’s energy map. If Astana can scale up alternative routes, it not only reduces Moscow’s leverage, but also ties Central Asia more firmly to Europe, Turkey, and beyond. For the West, supporting such diversification is not just an energy policy — it is a strategic bet on Kazakhstan’s sovereignty.
Negotiations and Red Lines
President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s recent comments about Kazakhstan’s role in potential Russia-Ukraine negotiations illustrate both caution and fear. Astana has carefully avoided presenting itself as a mediator, preferring instead to offer neutral venues. This hesitation is not just diplomatic modesty — it is rooted in existential concern.
Russian nationalists have repeatedly floated the idea of annexing Kazakhstan’s northern regions. For Astana, even symbolic overexposure risks feeding Moscow’s fantasies. Yet the recent demographic dynamics complicate Russia’s calculus. Recent research highlights the evolving identity of ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan’s north, where Moscow’s appeals increasingly fall flat.
The war in Ukraine has been sobering. What once seemed to Russian nationalists a quick blitzkrieg turned into a quagmire of attrition, destruction, and death. Entire cities have been erased; landmines render vast swathes of territory uninhabitable. For Kazakhstan’s Russian diaspora, the lesson is clear: war is not a parade. It is the nightmare their grandparents warned them about. Few now imagine annexation as a desirable or even feasible path.
A Way Forward
Kazakhstan’s future — and by extension, Central Asia’s stability — hinges on whether the West can muster the discipline to act strategically. The introduction of blanket secondary sanctions risks collapsing fragile economies and forcing them further into Moscow’s orbit. Pinpoint sanctions, combined with meaningful incentives, could do the opposite: empower local governments to resist Russian coercion without destabilizing their populations.
The case for Western responsibility is straightforward. By withdrawing, the U.S. and its allies ceded ground to Russia and China. Supporting Kazakhstan’s diversification, backing Turkic integration, and investing in local economies are not acts of charity. They are investments in global stability.
Former U.S. envoy Daniel Rosenblum put it bluntly: “The biggest challenge today is ourselves. We have to decide as a country, do we want to be engaged in the world or not? If we cut ourselves off from the world, we will ultimately be less secure and less prosperous”. Central Asia doesn’t need sermons, it needs strategy. If the West won’t provide it, Russia and China surely will — and they won’t ask twice.
PSCRP team