I think it's worthwhile to read the Russian govt talking points -- and FWIW, that's writ plain in the thread: it's a naked presentation of Russian interests and viewpoints. It's hard to understand why people are motivated to engage in conflict, without hearing both sides talk about it. Either or both sides might be delusional, dishonest or both, but it's more information than silence. To that end, I'd like to see similar treatment of Kazakh motives... but that seems harder to come by (thanks, in large part, to government censorship, as I understand it)
I don’t know anything about this situation, but definitely felt the author lost some credibility when their last tweet in the series promoted their previous viral tweet about a totally different situation where “god worked through them”.
Anyone else feel that was unnecessarily self-promoting and just a weird switch?
actually looks like revolution was more of "revolution". taking advantage of civil protests current president managed to get rid of previous president, a bunch of his relatives who had high posts and a bunch of people in security apparatus who were loyal to previous one.
there is a talk that violent protestors were like "titushki" during ukranian revolution: i.e. people that were operated by current president to achieve his goals.
Russia seems to point at things like this to create a silly narrative that their actions are actually America’s fault. Lots of people lap that kind of thing up in the west then excuse Russia for their crap. It’s amazingly effective.
No. A measly $1 million of funding from an American NGO to prodemocracy initiatives in an authoritarian country racked by inflation and other longer running issues is NOT to blame for Putin deciding to invade. Putin makes his own decisions and the people of Kazakhstan have their own agency, they are not stupid puppets of America.
You can argue it's not the proximal cause (which would imply arguing that the only thing the US did was spend a million dollars), but you can't argue that the US was promoting revolution.
The citizens of Kazakhstan, just like the citzens of Syria have their own agency. That doesn't mean you can't get played. Unless you mean that Kazaks have agency but the Syrians and Libyans didn't?
The best we can conclude here is that we don't know if this is or isn't in some way influenced by the US and some other foreign groups inherently. You can't say that the US definitely isn't angling for something here. That's the issue with meddling in other countries politics, people can reasonably suspect you're at fault when things happen.
Who cares what Russia thinks, their economy is in shambles, they can not bully Ukraine and they certainly can not bully Kazakhstan. Author writes as if Russia is at par of west powers, which is not even near the truth. They are dying society.
It's one interpretation of events. Another is that Putin has known all along he would need to act in Kazakhstan and staged the Ukrainian 'crisis' so that NATO politicians could go back to their constituents with a face-saving win in the 'standoff' while giving Putin free reign in Kazakhstan. We'll see how things play out...
Kazhakstan has: uranium, Baikonur cosmodrome, anti ballistic missile test site, and 25% ethnic Russians. Russia wants to have access to the resources and facilities and protect the ethnic Russians.
I think that depends very much on what the stated goals and likely outcomes are. In some theoretical future where a Russia-China alliance sweeps through eastern and central Europe I don't see any way the US would sit on the sidelines watching. But Crimea certainly shows there is some level of overt Russian aggression the US is willing to watch and do nothing about.
