On July 3, 2023, Dauren Abayev was appointed as the Ambassador of the Republic of Kazakhstan to the Russian Federation by the Decree of the Kazakh President, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. Seems it was hard for the Kremlin not to like him.

In August 2021, while being a deputy head of the Presidential Administration in Astana, he had, according to Azattyq.org, described the actions of his Kazakh co-citizens, who had been demanding government agencies and shops in Kazakhstan to render services in the Kazakh language, as a manifestation of ‘cave nationalism’, and, as a result, had been subjected to a lot of criticism in his homeland. In this case, the then-deputy head of the Kazakh Presidential Administration repeated word for word the formula that Putin likes saying – “Cave nationalism is a foolish thing”, “The ‘Russia for Russians’ slogan represents ‘cave nationalism” and so on.

Because of the foregoing, there probably was no difficulty at all for Astana to get Moscow’s consent (i.e. the agrément) to the appointment of Dauren Abayev as ambassador. But then, the rest of the matter dragged on for five months. Only last Monday, on December 4, he, at last, had the honor to present his credentials to the Russian head of state Vladimir Putin at a ceremony in the Kremlin.

The presentation of the credentials to the chief of state is, of course, quite formal these days. In most major capitals a copy of credentials is now first provided privately to the foreign minister, after which the new ambassador can deal with his host country’s foreign ministry. But the rules are such that he may proceed to business with ministries other than the foreign ministry only after the ceremony of presenting the credentials to the chief of State has been completed. That’s why all relations with the official bodies of the........

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