US needs to better protect our allies while fighting Russia, especially in Central Asia

Russia’s war on Ukraine has been one of those globally disruptive events with the geo-economic fallout reverberating across the planet. The past year has been especially tough for the countries in Moscow’s strategic eco-system. These states have been trying to walk between the raindrops: avoiding the sanctions fallout, while preserving difficult relations and vital economic ties with the Kremlin. President Biden needs to remember that.

It is particularly challenging for Kazakhstan, which for decades has been trying to enhance relations with the West. The Central Asian nation supports the much-needed international sanctions to compel Russia to end its aggression against Ukraine. However, Astana is geopolitically tethered to the Kremlin, and was rocked by unprecedented social unrest only weeks before Moscow launched its war against Kyiv.

The Feb. 16 phone call between President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky is just the latest in how Kazakhstan is trying to maintain a balancing act between Russia and the United States and Europe. Tokayev re-emphasized the urgent need for a diplomatic solution to the conflict in keeping with the U.N. charter and international law.

President Zelensky thanked Tokayev for the humanitarian assistance that Astana has provided to Kyiv. These days Kazakhstan is due to have early parliamentary elections on March 19 – as part of a major reform process accelerated by the January 2022 unrest. Kazakhstan is thus having to delicately deal with two different imperatives simultaneously: domestic political and economic reform and managing the sanctions and its fraught relationship with Russia.

Russia’s aggression against Ukraine became Kazakhstan’s signature multi-vector foreign policy’s most serious stress test since independence. Astana was able to carve out a delicate and difficult middle ground. It clearly stated that it doesn’t support the war and won’t be contributing forces. Despite its very close relations with Russia, Kazakhstan has maintained its commitment to the territorial integrity of Ukraine and refused to recognize the Kremlin’s annexation of territory in the Donbas region.

The Tokayev government likely hoped that Putin’s war would not drag on this long and that its balancing act would get it through this conflict with minimal cost. But it’s been a year now and no end in sight. If anything, Russia needs to improve its bargaining position through the  intensification and potential expansion of the kinetic battlespace. The longer the war rages on, the more difficult it becomes for Kazakhstan to avoid getting on the wrong side of Russia.

In the broader multilateral space involving sanctions, Astana has very little room to maneuver. Thus far, the Kazakhstani government has been in strict compliance with the sanctions regime, which includes measures to: end transactions with sanctioned entities, suspend supplies of goods to proscribed actors, and tighten controls over the business practices of state-owned enterprises. In addition, as part of its international commitments, it has worked hard to block attempts at sanctions evasion.

However, complying with sanctions has come at a cost. First, it threatens to aggravate relations with Moscow with whom Astana shares a very long border. Second, and more immediately, the Central Asian nation is incurring economic losses. When the international community imposed the sanctions, they did not count on them being an open-ended process. Sanctions did not come with a mechanism to compensate innocent bystanders.  

The United States and its western allies didn’t realize the sanctions’ long-term negative impact on countries with extensive economic ties with Russia. Elsewhere, some of the closest U.S. allies are allowing dubious interests, potentially connected to fugitive Kazakhstani oligarchs, to launch private investigations under the guise of parliamentary inquiries into the case of detained Kazakhstani journalist and politician Zhanbolat Mamay.

The U.K. government has clarified that it is not involved in the inquiry commission established by law firm Bindmans LLP, and which includes senior members of the House of Lords. The opacity and secrecy over who is financing the work of the commission has created serious misgivings in Astana. The view there is that its wealthy opponents are now exploiting human rights concerns in their continuing efforts to undermine stability in the country and at a very critical juncture.

There is a need for transparency on who is financing the work of this commission, as Russia could exploit the query to its advantage. Further compounding matters is the fact that the unintended consequences of the sanctions weakening Astana’s economic position are happening when the country is going through a crucial political transformation. Such a situation undermines U.S. policy to render Kazakhstan (and other post-Soviet nations) less dependent upon Russia. What is worse is that the sanctions regime, as it currently stands, conflicts with the American strategic interest to fortify political and economic resilience of the Central Asian nations.

Meanwhile, other states, which have close economic ties to Russia, such as Saudi Arabia, UAE, and India, flaunt U.S. efforts to isolate Moscow. If Washington ignores the actions of its friends and allies, it creates a precedent for post-Soviet countries, which are in a much weaker position and yet still trying to be in lockstep with the west.

A one-size-fits-all approach to sanctions is unsustainable and threatens to weaken sanctions as a core instrument in the U.S. foreign policy toolkit. There is an urgent need to calibrate the sanctions regime to where it can serve both U.S. needs: sustain the pressure on Russia, deny it crucial income and technology to sustain the war, and not have our allies and partners incur unnecessary economic pain and alienation. U.S. wins when our coalition is as broad as possible.

Kamran Bokhari, PhD, is the senior director of Eurasia Security and Prosperity portfolio at the New Lines Institute for Strategy & Policy in Washington, D.C. He is also a national security and foreign policy specialist at the University of Ottawa’s Professional Development Institute. Bokhari has served as the coordinator for Central Asia Studies at the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute. Follow him on Twitter @KamranBokhari