Award-winning journalist and scholar and a Senior Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute Dr. James M. Dorsey published a piece on 5 January provocatively asking “Is Kazakhstan Russia’s Next Ukraine?” He not so subtly hints that Russia wants to take over parts of that neighboring country, relying on some fringe nationalists’ comments and rabblerousing media commentary. Dorsey also tries to artificially manufacture the false perception of a rift between the Russian and Kazakhstani leaderships in order to advance his narrative agenda.
Despite his prestigious credentials, observers shouldn’t pay attention to Dorsey’s latest article. It’s nothing but a thinly disguised information warfare attack to fearmonger about Russia’s grand strategic intentions. His piece came out the day that Kazakhstan fell victim to a Hybrid War of Terror much worse than the structurally similar Color Revolution-driven unrest that the US experienced on January 6th. Shortly after, its internationally recognized leader requested the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization’s (CSTO) assistance in putting down this attempted terrorist takeover of his country.
It was inevitable that there’d be an information warfare campaign preceding that predictable scenario that ultimately transpired, which is the role that Dorsey’s critique article plays whether he was conscious of it while writing or not. Observers can expect the narratives that were introduced in his piece to be built upon and subsequently propagated across the coming weeks as this Russian-led military intervention successfully neutralizes Kazakhstan’s terrorist threat. Everything in his piece is nothing but innuendo aimed at scaring his audience into thinking that Russia wants to invade Kazakhstan.
In reality, the Kremlin has no such intentions. The majority-Russian-populated corners of that fraternal neighboring state aren’t rich in resources and don’t serve any strategic purpose. Moreover, the “Balkanization” of this diverse country could create opportunities for regional terrorist groups like ISIS-K to expand, which is the exact opposite of what Russia would ever want to have happen. Furthermore, Russia’s only intentions in intervening in Kazakhstan upon its internationally recognized leadership’s urgent request is to neutralize terrorist forces, stabilize the situation, and prevent the spillover of chaos.
Be that as it is, Dorsey attempts to deliberately mislead his audience about Russia’s intentions by relying on the earlier mentioned means of overexaggerating the decision-making importance of fringe nationalist figures’ statements and rabblerousing media commentary. President Tokayev obviously doesn’t share Dorsey’s ill-intended faux “concerns” since he requested the Russian-led CSTO to deploy peacekeeping forces in his country, which he wouldn’t have done if he was afraid of an “invasion”. Quite clearly, Kazakhstan trusts Russia enough to have it lead these sensitive military operations.
Seeing as how Dorsey’s ridiculous predictions won’t come to pass, one might wonder why he even made them in the first place. Those who might give him the benefit of the doubt could claim that he’s simply uninformed about regional dynamics but wanted to attract attention by talking about a hot-button topic that he clearly wasn’t qualified to accurately analyze. Cynics, however, might assert that he has ideologically driven or perhaps other motivations such as financial ones to eagerly take the charge in pioneering the US-led West’s infowar against the Russian-Kazakhstani Strategic Partnership.
Whatever the case may be, and of course only Dorsey himself can account for this (though it’s unlikely that he’d do so unless he’s publicly challenged enough and even then he might simply ignore the masses out of narrative/political convenience), there’s no doubt that observers shouldn’t take his latest thoughts on this topic seriously. The very fact that Kazakhstan urgently requested the Russian-led CSTO to intervene unquestionably debunks Dorsey’s false narrative implying some serious problems between those two countries. His article should therefore be seen in hindsight as unsuccessful propaganda.