Putin is taking a risk by sending troops to Kazakhstan

 

 The old joke about the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact was that it was the only military union to attack itself after its tanks entered Prague in 1968 to crush the reform movement there. As troops from Russia's Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) deployed in Kazakhstan on Thursday, some heard an "ominous echo" of the so-called Prague Spring of 1968 and the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. The Guardian newspaper.

 Conceived as a pact of mutual defense, the CSTO has not carried out any joint deployments of troops since its founding in 1999. It is now called upon to quell internal unrest in one of its member states.

Kazakh President Kasim-Jomart Tokayev says the uprising was inspired by foreign-backed "terrorists" to justify their call, but the fact that he is turning to the CSTO suggests he no longer feels he can trust his own your strength. When Tokayev's request came, the CSTO responded in a matter of hours, and Russian paratroopers had already begun arriving in Kazakhstan on Thursday morning.

 In a firm address to the nation on Friday, in which he said he personally approved orders to shoot dead people, Tokayev expressed "special thanks" to Vladimir Putin for sending troops, but said they had not taken part in any fighting.

The force totals about 2,500 people, the regional alliance said, and Russia's defense ministry said it had been used to guard key infrastructure.

 Some in Moscow praised the decision to intervene. Maxim Suchkov, director of the Institute for International Studies at MGIMO, a leading Moscow university, dismissed comparisons to Soviet-era Warsaw Pact interventions as "propaganda" and said the "brief mission" could boost Russia's position in the region.

The events in Kazakhstan represent "a crisis in which Moscow can be instrumental and useful," Suchkov wrote on Twitter.

 One similarity with the Warsaw Pact is that although the CSTO is a union, the decision to intervene was almost certainly made in Moscow. This was welcomed by the Belarusian Alexander Lukashenko, who in 2020 managed to crush a huge revolution using his own internal forces, but Putin is making important decisions.

The Russian president can hope that a brief mission will quickly restore order and leave Kazakhstan grateful and indebted to Moscow, but the operation carries risks.

 The fact that the CSTO move is seen as Russian interference has terrified many in Kazakhstan, where one of former President Nursultan Nazarbayev's main achievements was avoiding a major conflict between Kazakhstan's majority and the country's ethnic Russian minority.

Kazakhstan has proudly pursued a "multi-vector" foreign policy for years, and its close relations with Moscow have been offset by good relations with Western countries. When news of Tokayev's request to the CSTO surfaced on Wednesday, the editor-in-chief of state-run RT television, Margarita Simonyan, set out a list of demands.

 "We definitely need to help, but we also need to set some conditions," she wrote on Twitter. These include making Russian the country's second state language and recognizing Crimea as part of Russia.

This may have been a sign of how some in Moscow view the CSTO. If Tokayev manages to quell the protests with Moscow's help, the Russians can expect services in return.