Newsweek, in a piece, entitled “Russia’s Saber-Rattling Against Neighbor Risks Drawing China’s Ire”, quoted Kate Mallinson, an associate fellow at Chatham House, as saying: “The bellicose rhetoric has led to the perceived risk of a Russian invasion into Kazakhstan’s northern territories… The risk of an invasion into northern Kazakhstan, where most of the population is Russian, remains a likelihood. But, in our view, [it] is mitigated by the new alignment between China and Russia and China’s leverage over its vassal state partner, Russia. It is also unlikely while Russia is still on the offensive in Ukraine”.

This point of view on the prospects for the development of the situation in Russian-Kazakh relations seems to be shared by the author of the above-mentioned article, Aadil Barr. In justifying that way of seeing things, he refers to the following circumstances: “Kazakhstan’s ambivalent position on the Ukraine war has since turned the pro-war commentators against Astana. Dmitry Steshin, a journalist with the pro-Kremlin media outlet Komsomolskaya Pravda, compared the demographic situation in Ukraine and Kazakhstan in April 2023, suggesting that Moscow has a “historical right” to the northern regions of the Central Asian country”.

Statements like the one made by Dmitry Steshin, are regularly being heard in Russia. But does this mean that, as Kate Mallinson claimed, ‘the risk of an invasion into northern Kazakhstan, where most of the population is Russian, remains a likelihood’? Well, forming the answer to this question depends on how one judge things related to it.

First, an argument by Kate Mallinson about ‘northern Kazakhstan, where most of the population is Russian’ does not hold true anymore. In none of the four provinces of Northern Kazakhstan do Russians make up half or more of the population. Ethnic Kazakhs constitute an absolute majority in two of them, in Pavlodar and Akmola provinces, and a relative majority in one, Kostanay province. Only in the North Kazakhstan province do Russians make up a relative majority, which, however, is being rapidly lost.

Second, it is quite conceivable that Northern Kazakhstan on its own has been and still is of little interest to Russia. The region can be compared with neither the Donbas which used to be the heart of Ukraine’s industrial economy, nor the Crimean Peninsula on which the Russian Black Sea Fleet is based. In the event of its annexation by Moscow, the Russian Federation would get another depressed and donation-dependent region with a shrinking and aging ethnic Russian (Slavic, European) population, which, besides that, does not already form a majority.

Of course, now, based on the experience of the last two years, one can expect anything from the Russian Federation. So by and large, nothing can be ruled out. Yet common sense suggests that the odds of Russia attempting to ‘invade the northern regions of Kazakhstan’ in the foreseeable future are quite low.

When talking about Kazakhstan, Russian........

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