Kyiv, Ukraine – Virtually two years in the past, a dozen Uzbek kids pleaded with their president to avoid wasting them from the horrors of the Russian-Ukrainian struggle.
Uzbek nationals enrolled in western Russia’s Kursk Medical College recorded a video handle to Shavkat Mirziyoyev in October 2022 saying their research had been affected by Kyiv’s shelling of close by cities and the hostilities within the neighbouring Ukrainian area of Sumy.
“Please switch us to medical faculties in Uzbekistan,” one of many college students mentioned. Uzbek diplomats pledged to evaluate the scenario.
There have been no additional experiences about their destiny – similar to Uzbekistan’s official response to one of many struggle’s most daring developments – Kyiv’s incursion into Kursk.
Since August 6, Ukrainian forces have reportedly occupied dozens of villages and hamlets on greater than 1,000 sq. kilometres (386 sq. miles) and captured Russian servicemen.
Uzbekistan needed to reply – in accordance with the letter of the Collective Safety Treaty (CST), a navy accord Tashkent signed with Russia, its Central Asian neighbours Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and Belarus.
‘They clearly wouldn’t go to Kursk’
However solely one in all their leaders, the Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, has to date commented on the Kursk offensive.
“Let’s sit down and finish this struggle. Neither Ukrainian folks, nor Russians or Belarusians want it,” he instructed the Rossiya tv community on Thursday, claiming that solely Washington “advantages” from the struggle.
On Saturday, Lukashenko ordered a deployment of troops to the Belarusian border with Ukraine. Belarusian state-controlled tv confirmed tanks and missiles loaded onto trains.
However Ukrainian defence analyst Vladislav Seleznyov instructed the RBK Ukraine information company that the deployment was a “trick” and that arms and troops didn’t, in reality, attain the border.
Leaders of different CST member states didn’t say a phrase concerning the Kursk incursion – and haven’t supplied any navy support to Russia.
“Moscow wouldn’t thoughts if the forces [of CST member states] might contribute to fixing its issues, however they clearly wouldn’t go to Kursk even when summoned,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen College, instructed Al Jazeera.
A CST member state has to ask for navy support from different pact members. Moscow didn’t, as a result of it might be tantamount to Putin’s admission of political and navy weak point, observers say.
“If [Ukraine’s] profitable navy operation in Kursk was a slap to Putin, then the invitation of CST [forces] could be a second slap,” Dosym Satpayev, an analyst based mostly in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s monetary centre, instructed Al Jazeera.
“The CST was actively marketed as a construction the place Russia is the primary safety umbrella for all member states,” Satpayev mentioned.
Since day one in all Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the nations of Central Asia and Transcaucasus – together with Armenia, that suspended its CST membership, assumed an “ostrich place”, Satpayev mentioned.
They forbade their nationals to struggle for both aspect and pledged to stay to Western sanctions slapped on Moscow.
However the sanctions malfunction as a result of hundreds of firms in ex-Soviet republics revenue from re-exporting twin objective items equivalent to microchips and semiconductors to Russia.
In the meantime, the variety of Russian firms in Kazakhstan alone tripled from 7,000 in 2019 to greater than 20,000 in 2024, Satpayev mentioned.
Wartime balancing acts
Western efforts to plant democracy in Central Asia within the Nineteen Nineties largely failed, and regional leaders pragmatically stability between Moscow, Beijing and, more and more, Ankara.
“Ukraine’s instance exhibits that when you have got an aggressive neighbour equivalent to Russia, it’s a must to all the time preserve your powder dry,” Satpayev mentioned.
The balancing act, nevertheless, runs counter to public opinion within the area.
Russia’s delicate energy and the dominance of Moscow-controlled media that propagate anti-Ukrainian and anti-Western views uphold pro-Kremlin sentiment.
“Issues are very harsh lately – you both root for the US and their insurance policies, or for Russia,” a businessman in Almaty who requested anonymity instructed Al Jazeera.
The Kremlin’s narrative “nailed one thought in our heads – America is the enemy – sly, duplicitous, stuffed with lies”, he mentioned.
Putin has downplayed the gravity of the Kursk invasion.
As a substitute of calling it an act of struggle or invasion, he has dubbed the push towards Ukraine’s cross-border assault as a “counterterrorism operation”.
The time period was the Kremlin’s most well-liked euphemism for the second struggle in Chechnya that started in 1999 and resulted in struggle crimes and human rights abuses on each side.
The Kremlin is “attempting to silence what’s taking place [in Kursk], and its allies do the identical”, mentioned Temur Umarov, an Uzbekistan-born knowledgeable with Carnegie Russia Eurasia Middle, a assume tank in Berlin.
“So long as Russia’s political regime isn’t beneath menace, nobody goes to consider expressing a particular place, as a result of such a place limits wiggle room,” he instructed Al Jazeera.
The time period “counterterrorism scenario” additionally maintains Putin’s legitimacy for common Russians, mentioned Alisher Ilkhamov, head of Central Asia Due Diligence, a London-based assume tank.
In the meantime, Putin indicators that he “wouldn’t use nuclear arms as a weapon of retribution and doesn’t see the Ukrainian offensive as a pretext to escalate the battle with the West,” Ilkhamov instructed Al Jazeera.
Putin’s stance “provides Central Asian nations an opportunity to sigh with aid and frees them from the necessity to stand as much as defend their CST ally,” he mentioned.
In the meantime, “counterterrorism operations” are one thing Russian areas have been used to for many years – particularly the Northern Caucasus.
However those that survived such “operations” don’t have anything however harrowing recollections.
“The very time period makes me convulse,” Madina, a Chechen refugee residing in a European nation, instructed Al Jazeera.
She claimed that throughout the second Chechen struggle, Russian troopers killed her older brother and two cousins, maimed her father, and destroyed the condo constructing they lived in.
“I actually, actually pity those that dwell within the counterterrorism zone in Kursk,” Madina, who withheld her final identify and placement as a result of her kinfolk nonetheless dwell in Chechnya, instructed Al Jazeera.
