By Independent News Roundup
The Washington Post recently published a piece fearmongering that Putin’s “next stop” after Ukraine might be Armenia and/or Kazakhstan, which they released in the run-up to the C5+1 Summit in DC between the five Central Asian leaders and Trump. It was written by Seth Cropsey and Joseph Epstein, the president of the Yorktown Institute and the director of the Turan Research Center therein. Their organization focuses on “great power competition”, “military supremacy”, and “alliance-building”.
Those two’s mentioning of Armenia and Kazakhstan in this provocative context, as well as the timing of their article, was deliberate. The first functions as the irreplaceable transit state along the new “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” (TRIPP), which was assessed here in the summer shortly after its announcement as threatening to undermine Russia’s regional position. The fear is that NATO-member Turkiye will inject Western influence into the South Caucasus and Central Asia via this route.
Accordingly, Kazakhstan figures prominently in these plans since it’s the most prosperous country in the latter region and also shares the world’s longest land border with Russia, NATO’s rival. It was assessed earlier this month that “The West Is Posing New Challenges To Russia Along Its Entire Southern Periphery” through TRIPP’s acceleration of those two regions’ engagement with the West. Even Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned about the bloc’s plans there as well as its de facto EU twin’s.
Armenia and Kazakhstan’s crucial roles in facilitating the Turkish-led injection of Western influence into their respective interconnected regions at the increasing expense of Russian interests there explains why Cropsey and Epstein decided to fearmonger that those two might be Putin’s “next stop” after Ukraine. The timing of their provocative piece importantly coincided with the C5+1 Summit and was therefore meant to influence off-the-record conversations there and/or Western reporting about the event.
According to them, last summer’s unrest in Armenia was a failed Kremlin-backed coup while Kazakhstan is being targeted through less visible forms of pressure such as the creation of pro-Russian influence networks, which they imply could precede a Donbass-like ethno-regional conflict in the north. The first was actually a patriotic revolt over the perception that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan sold Armenia out to its Turkic neighbors while the second is based on unverified leaked reports and attendant speculation.
The reality is that Russia accepts that the US successfully expanded its influence in the South Caucasus and respects Kazakhstan’s multi-alignment policy. The only concern that it has is that extra-regional actors like the US, EU, NATO, and Turkiye – all of whom it’s fighting by proxy in Ukraine to varying extents – could exploit those two and their regions to threaten its national security as part of their rivalry. That would risk expanding their proxy war from Eastern Europe to the South Caucasus and/or Central Asia.
Cropsey and Epstein propose more trade and investment between the US, Armenia and Kazakhstan, and their regions, which sounds innocent but could lead to or disguise closer cooperation on other issues like security that come at Russia’s expense. What they want to do is manipulate the perceptions of Russia’s partners against it and/or provoke an overreaction from Russia that ruins their relations for the same divide-and-rule ends, which is why it’s crucial that they’re aware of this so they can avoid falling for it.
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