The Basmanny district court in Russia sentenced former Ukrainian Ambassador to Kazakhstan Petro Vrublevskiy in absentia to six years in prison on August 26 on a charge of inciting ethnic hatred.
Earlier this year, Russian authorities issued an arrest warrant for Vrublevskiy and placed him on the country's registry of terrorists and extremists.
Vrublevskiy found himself at the center of a scandal in August 2022 -- about six months after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine -- after he said in an interview with noted Kazakh blogger Dias Kuzairov that "the more Russians we kill now, the fewer of them our children will have to kill in the future."
Moscow and Russian organizations in Kazakhstan then demanded that Astana expel the diplomat for his controversial statement, but Kazakh authorities refused, though they did ask Kyiv to replace him.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in early October 2022 that Moscow was "outraged" by the fact that Vrublevskiy remained in Kazakhstan, adding that the Kazakh ambassador to Russia had been summoned over the issue.
In response, the Kazakh Foreign Ministry said that the tone of Moscow’s request to expel the Ukrainian ambassador was "dissonant to the character of the allied mutual ties between Kazakhstan and Russia as equal strategic partners."
The Kazakh side also said at the time that Astana and Kyiv have a "full understanding" of the situation and that a decision on the diplomat leaving Kazakhstan would be made solely by Kyiv.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy sacked Vrublevskiy in mid-October 2022.
The Kazakh government under President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev has been trying to juggle its good ties with Ukraine, its Western allies, and Russia since Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine.
While not openly condemning Russia’s aggression, Toqaev has publicly stated that his country would not recognize Russian-occupied entities in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
Kazakh businesses last year set up so called "invincibility" yurts (traditional nomadic felt tents) in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, and several other Ukrainian cities, to provide local residents with food, tea, warmth, and the possibility of charging electronic devices.