May 28, 2022 5 min read

Editor’s note: Artyom Sergazinov currently lives in Kazakhstan. He is self-employed, an avid traveler, and likes writing about current events in the world. 

Prior to Vladimir Putin’s address to the Russians that was made on Feb. 21, somewhere in the vast space of the World Wide Web I had already come across this meme:

Before listening to the almost-hour-long address by Russia’s president, I had thought the meme was certainly an exaggeration. However, that very day, after the speech had been posted on YouTube, I started to doubt the correctness of my own opinion. February 24 made it clear: Living next to Russia could generate a lot of speculation in terms of one short question: “What – and who – could be next after Ukraine?”

Although the Republic of Kazakhstan, the place where I currently reside, has never had any conflict with its northern neighbor, which also happens to be the largest-by-territory country in the world, the predominant thought that “nothing bad will happen” has begun to rapidly wane, now knowing what Putin is capable of doing. In other words, what is the future of Russia’s other 13 neighbors? In particular, will Kazakhstan become another Ukraine?

To begin with, it is important to understand what has been happening on the post-Soviet territory since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. – also known as “the last attempt of humanity at communism” – for the past 30 or so years. The Soviet Union officially ended the process of its gradual dissolution on Dec. 26, 1991, after which every single soviet socialist republic that had been part of the union was left on its own. Notably, Russia, which then became the Russian Federation, took the responsibility for all of the USSR’s foreign debt and agreed to gradually pay it back. However, the country along with the other former Socialist republics, such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Armenia, just to name a few, experienced huge economic and social depression as the states took off on a new journey to transform their damaged economies, having gained their independence. In short, most of the former Soviet states of the 1990s had enormous rises in the amount of crime, corruption, and poverty.

Although the overall situation in the post-Soviet republics was improving step by step, the first known militarized conflict with a neighbor that Russia was involved in was the First Chechen War from 1994 to 1996. Despite the fact that the Chechen Republic was not a separate, independent state, like Ukraine or Belarus, for instance, but was instead a republic as part of the Russian Federation, the war has generally been considered a military conflict between Russia and Chechnya.

Roughly 10 years later, the diplomatic crisis between Georgia and Russia led to the first officially recognized military hostility that post-Soviet Russia was involved in: the Russo-Georgian War. The war did not evolve into prolonged fighting, and even though Russia gradually improved and strengthened its relations with both Chechnya and Georgia, it then became clear that close neighbors and former Soviet states can, indeed, fight between each other. Some experts believed the conflicts occurred based on core religious, ethnic, and cultural differences between the states despite being once united by communism and a common historic past of almost a century long.

If, any time before 2014, you had told a Russian or Ukrainian that Russia and Ukraine would become enemies, you would have been called insane. Considering how similar the two states are historically and culturally, the situation – even now, knowing that people are dying and guns are being fired – is perceived as nothing less than extremely surreal. Even though jumping to conclusions regarding the war is too early at this point since commenting on the contemporary Russo-Ukrainian conflict might produce nothing better than educated guesses, it is more than safe to make two certain statements. First, human tank-on-tank wars are still a thing in 2022, as they have been for the past century or so. When people think of modern militarized conflicts, they imagine flying drones and supersonic jets that are operated by military tech-wizards from their headquarters, nuclear missiles that promise to wipe out our planet in seconds, and soldier-robots, just like in the “Robocop” movie, all of which, for the most part, are still a fairy tale. The reality is that ordinary people – not bots or computers – have to die when it comes to fighting a war. Second, former allies, close neighbors, and economic partners do, in fact, fight each other, as the Russo-Ukrainian War has been demonstrating since 2014. That basically implies – at least for those states sharing a border with Russia – that while Putin and his team are in power, things can turn dicey at any moment.

Considering all that has been mentioned above, could Kazakhstan become the next “Ukraine?” There is always a possibility for that to happen, although, knowing that the relations between the two states have been cooperative and productive since the demise of the U.S.S.R., the thought of the war between Russia and Kazakhstan – at least at this point – is nothing more than signs of a rapid panic onset rather than an immediate possibility. After all, there must be definite reasons, which are still obscure, why Ukraine – and not Belarus, or Azerbaijan, or Kazakhstan, or Latvia, or Armenia – has been targeted by Russia.

Artyom Sergazinov can be reached by email at 8885136@gmail.com.