During a recent meeting with the CBS News team, who had arrived to interview him, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, in addition to everything else, the following: “For him [Russian President Vladimir Putin], we are a satellite of the Russian Federation. Currently, it’s us, then it’ll be Kazakhstan, then the Baltic states, then Poland, then Germany. At least half of Germany”. Well, according to the current Ukrainian president, Kazakhstan is not alone in facing the new threat of invasion. But there’s something that must be taken into account. Four of the countries on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s list, namely the Baltic States and Poland, are already protected by NATO’s commitment to defend its members in the event of an attack. For this reason, the Russian power will unlikely make a move on them.
The fifth one, the Federal Republic of Germany, does not have common borders with the Russian Federation, first off. Second, Germany has been and remains a vital part of the United States defense strategy in Europe ever since the end of World War II and is home to five of the seven US Army garrisons in Europe (the other two are in Belgium and Italy). According to Deutsche Welle, the total number of US military personnel has risen significantly in the past few years, from under 39,000 in 2019 to over 50,000 in 2024. For these reasons, Russian aggressive movement in that direction seems even less likely.
Of the countries that Volodymyr Zelensky described as put at risk of being invaded by Russia, Kazakhstan seems therefore to be the only one whom the above warning of the Ukrainian President may concern. There is nothing new in such an interpretation of the situation in the post-Soviet area amid the war in Ukraine. Russian political elites seem to have long decided that Kazakhstan, along with Belarus and Ukraine, should somehow be brought back under Moscow’s control. In February 2003, the Kremlin initiated a process of creating a single economic space (CES) consisting of Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and the Russian Federation to translate that concept into reality. But things didn’t turn out just how Moscow had wished or planned. Official Kyiv dropped out of the project, and Ukraine now is fighting the Russians. Russia and Belarus are formally part of a union state and have been in talks for years to move closer together. And a completely different thing, with Kazakhstan, which last year rejected Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s offer for the Central Asian nation to join the Union State of Russia and Belarus. But Moscow doesn’t seem........