Stephen Blank
BACKGROUND: Russia’s counterattack in Central Asia is multi-dimensional. In culture Moscow vigilantly defends the public use and privileged status of the Russian language in local laws and pressures local governments to retain that status despite rising public sentiment to exalt local, national or other foreign languages at the expense of Russian. Moscow is also pressuring Central Asian states on a range of other issues. For example, Russian spokespersons frequently raise the threat of annexing Northern Kazakhstan as constituting part of an alleged Russian territory. Moscow continues to pressure Central Asian governments to join the organizations it has established since 1991 to preserve its hegemony under a façade of multilateralism: the CSTO, the Eurasian Economic Union, and more recently a prospective gas union to ensure these states’ subordination to Russia’s energy interests. Russia also continues to strive with China, whose presence in the region is both indispensable and unavoidable.
While China continues to extend its economic presence in Central Asia, it has largely left the hard security agenda to Russia’s control, not least due to its wariness about becoming tied down in a secondary if not tertiary theater. As a result, scholars discern a “division of labor” where China is the “banker” and Russia the “sheriff.” Yet this is not the whole picture because Russia seeks to maintain its power over the regional energy economy to buttress its position and deny Chinese leadership. Thus, Russia continues to come up with its own continental plans for trade with Central Asian states and continues to reject attempts by China and Central Asian states to weaken Russia’s dominance over energy flows.
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