Thread by @DrAlakbarov

Nursultan Nazarbayev was the last barricade blocking a Russian-Kazakh confrontation.

But as he got older and weaker, Putin managed to beat him.

Most Kazakh activists pushing for Russian inherited from Soviet days to take second place to Kazakh as the country’s primary language.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov charged that xenophobia had sparked several attacks on Russian speakers in Kazakhstan.

Meanwhile...

Alexander Boroday, a former separatist leader in Ukraine’s Donetsk-turned-member of the Russian parliament stated:

“Unfortunately, in Asia, only the language of power is well understood." - referring to Kazakhstan.

Dariga Nazabayeva, a member of the Kazakh parliament and daughter of Nazarbayev, who has a close relationship with Putin, responded that “cases of xenophobia sometimes occur in Russia too.”

“One can label calling ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan a Diaspora as a political mistake for these are our lands which have been temporarily torn away from Russia,” said Pavel Shperov, a former ultra-nationalist member of the Russian parliament.

Putin first sent a chill down Kazakh spines seven years ago when a student in a news conference asked him nine months after the annexation of Crimea whether Kazakhstan risked a fate similar to that of Ukraine.

Putin noted that then-president Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s Soviet-era Communist party boss, had “performed a unique feat: he has created a state on a territory where there has never been a state. The Kazakhs never had a state of their own, and he created it.”

Nazarbayev was fast to announce plans to celebrate the 550th anniversary of the Kazakh Khanate that dates back to 1465.

“Our state did not arise from scratch…The statehood of the Kazakhs dates to those times,” he said.

Nazarbayev pushed his point even further. Two months later, he declarted celebrations of Kazakh Independence Day that “independence was hard-won by many generations of our ancestors, who defended our sacred land with blood and sweat."