Russia is upsetting friends and losing influence in Asia
Meanwhile, the spikes in food and energy prices caused by Mr Putin’s war are a big domestic headache for the two Asian leaders. Russia’s widely documented brutality towards Ukrainian civilians is an embarrassment by association—India has called for an international investigation into possible war crimes. Above all, strongmen hate a loser, and a diminished Mr Putin is starting very much to look like one.
That is why India “hitched its Eurasian wagon to the Russian star”, as C. Raja Mohan of the Asia Society Policy Institute, an American think-tank, puts it. Close ties with the Soviet Union gave India privileged access to the Central Asian republics during the cold war. More recently, Russia lobbied for India’s inclusion in the China-dominated. But now the war in Ukraine is weakening Russia’s pre-eminent influence in Central Asia, and India’s with it.
To India’s irritation, the vacuum is being filled by China, which is already Central Asia’s biggest economic partner and now seeks, Mr Xi pointedly chose to stop in Kazakhstan, making it his first trip abroad since the pandemic started. There he reassured Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev, the president, of China’s support for Kazakhstan’s “independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity”.
Only one country is potentially challenging those: Russia. Like Ukraine, Kazakhstan shares a long border with Russia and has a sizeable ethnic-Russian minority. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian ultranationalists have claimed swathes of northern Kazakhstan. Their rhetoric has grown shriller this year. Pro-Kremlin commentators accuse Mr Tokayev of disloyalty for not supporting Russia over Ukraine after itfrom an attempted putsch in January.
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