ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- A diplomat before he became a politician, Kazakh President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev has mastered the art of getting a timely message across while leaving his audience pondering what the message means.
His call last week for closer defense cooperation among Central Asian countries is a case in point.
The proposal didn't go unnoticed by the pro-Kremlin commentariat in Russia, which sees Central Asian security as well within its sphere of privileged interests, despite the war in Ukraine.
And it won a ringing endorsement from a pro-government media outlet in Azerbaijan, a country that last month participated in rare Russia-free military drills with Central Asian countries in western Kazakhstan.
But were Toqaev's words anything more than posturing?
"Since the war in Ukraine began, Central Asia has had a chance to reinvent itself in a comfortable geopolitical space," said Luca Anceschi, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow.
"They are trying to say that they are not on Russia's side in Ukraine, like Belarus is, but they are not with Ukraine either. They have ties with the West but are not pro-Western," Anceschi told RFE/RL.
"But as the war goes on, as the discussion around secondary sanctions grows, perhaps the region's governments see that this space is shrinking somewhat."
All the more reason then, to emphasize regional integration on Central Asian terms, which is precisely what Toqaev did in an op-ed prefacing the sixth consultative meeting of the presidents of Central Asia in Astana on August 9.
At the same time, "initiatives for integration inside Central Asia are often very vague on details and sometimes amount to no more than empty rhetoric," Anceschi argued.
'Regional Security Architecture' Without Russia?
The main impetus towards closer cooperation in Central Asia has come from Uzbekistan, the region's most populous country and the only one to share a border with every country in the region.
If under first President Islam Karimov Tashkent viewed much of the neighborhood as an annoyance to be kept at arm's length, successor Shavkat Mirziyoev saw fresh opportunities for trade and diplomatic unity when he came to power in 2016.
In an August 14 article on this topic, former Uzbek Foreign Minister and special presidential aide on foreign policy Abdulaziz Komilov wrote that Uzbekistan "had assumed a special responsibility for the future of Central Asia" by "completely abandoning outdated approaches to establishing relations with neighbors."
That is about as far as any Uzbek official will go in criticizing the late Karimov.
But it is fair to say that Uzbekistan's ties with all of its Central Asian neighbors have improved under Mirziyoev, with the now annual five-country summits appearing for the first time in 2018.
At the same time, the region's countries have traditionally had stronger economic and political relationships with China and Russia than within the region.
So Toqaev's op-ed on stronger regional ties, published by the state-run Kazakhstanskaya pravda -- Central Asian Renaissance: Towards Sustainable Development And Prosperity -- was bound to raise eyebrows.
Because beyond stressing Central Asia's unique history and economic potential, Toqaev also called for "cooperation in defense and security" and even the "creation of a regional security architecture" that would include a "catalogue of security risks" for Central Asia.
These were naturally the parts of the op-ed noticed by commentators in Russia, whose war in Ukraine was referred to obliquely by the author in terms of instability on the region's perimeter.
For pro-Kremlin nationalist television and radio personality Sergei Mardan, Toqaev's words indicated that Kazakhstan had lost faith in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a Russian-dominated military bloc that includes the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.
Mardan argued that the CSTO had saved Toqaev and his administration from "the revolution of the Mambets" -- code for Kazakhstan's deadly January 2022 unrest, which left more than 230 dead and prompted an intervention by a Russian-led CSTO peacekeeping force.
In using "Mambets," Mardan was employing a slur for rural Kazakhs that is from the Soviet era.
But Mardan told his some 240,000 followers on Telegram that "the idea of forming a defense union in Central Asia cannot be called viable."
"Each of the republics has its own interests [and] many border issues have not been resolved," he said.
Enthusiasm In Baku
A "defense union" was not the exact phrase used by Toqaev, who made sure to mention in his article he backed the participation of Central Asian states in a range of groupings, including the CSTO and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
But the idea of a Central Asian NATO was seized upon in other Russian commentaries about the Kazakh president's article.
In the August 12 column titled Rats And Ships: "Central Asian Defense Union" Smells Of The British Pound And Delusion, published in the Asia-focused Vostochniy ekspress, author Fedor Kirsanov insisted that the apparent proposal for a new regional bloc likely originated with the British intelligence agency MI6.
"The union idea, predictably, was suggested by Toqaev, who has recently donned the toga of a political thinker," Kirsanov wrote.
"To be sure, the tail of a red fox is clearly sticking out from underneath the toga, but these are details," he added.
Then there was the Russian-focused YouTube channel Khod Mysley (more than 450,000 subscribers), whose author questioned whether Toqaev was following Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian, who "under the leadership of the Anglo-Saxons, is slowly but surely turning Armenia from a friend of Russia into an enemy."
Kazakhstan has been accustomed to this kind of hostile Russian rhetoric since it failed to back Russia's 2022 invasion -- which occurred just a month after the historic unrest known as Bloody January.
But if Toqaev's musings went down badly in Russia, they were praised in Baku by the privately owned Haqqin media outlet -- which is often viewed as having close ties to hawks in the Azerbaijani regime.
An article on Toqaev's proposal by Haqqin's Zukhra Novruzova described the Kazakh leader as "a highly experienced diplomat, significantly superior in class to his colleagues from the...Russian Foreign Ministry."
And Toqaev's concerns were "fully logical," argued Novruzova, given Russia's tendency toward militarism and the uncertainty of when and how the Ukraine war will end.
"All developments indicate that for the Kremlin elites, Russia's peaceful development and the restoration of its economy are of no interest at all," he said. "In other words, the Kremlin will not get on a peaceful track under the current regime -- the machine of state aggression has been put in drive," Novruzova wrote.
The view from Baku is even more interesting in light of both the Birlestik-2024 military drills that involved Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan in western Kazakhstan last month and the small-scale naval exercises involving Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan in Baku's section of the Caspian Sea last year.
Azerbaijan -- which shares Turkic heritage with four of the five Central Asian states -- has become a source of admiration for some analysts in the region since Turkey-allied Baku reclaimed militarily the contested territory of Nagorno-Karabakh from nominal Russian partner Armenia.
And Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev attended the meeting of Central Asian leaders in Astana -- the only head of state from outside the region to do so.
Nevertheless, argues Fuad Shahbazov, a Baku-based political analyst, nobody is really seeking out new Eurasian military alliances at this point.
"Azerbaijan believes that deepening ties with Central Asia gives it more room to maneuver," Shahbazov said, noting that Baku is pursuing a similar drive with other countries against a souring of ties with the West and its traditionally complicated ties with Russia.
But in the long term, the analyst says, Azerbaijan views Central Asia through the prism of trade, specifically the Middle Corridor -- a 6,500-kilometer trade route connecting China to Europe through Central Asia and the Caucasus but bypassing Russia -- rather than security.
"With Kazakhstan, [Baku's interest] is more about energy and logistics," Shahbazov told RFE/RL.
