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“China provides golf carts instead if IFVs because they want to fight to the last RuZZian. As RuZZia is destroyed, China walks into Siberia and the ‘stans’.”

What CSTO doing?

OilPrice.com reports:

Kazakhstan Calls for a Russia-Free Defense Bloc in Central Asia

“Kazakh President Toqaev has called for increased defense cooperation among Central Asian countries, potentially forming a regional security architecture.

This proposal has been met with mixed reactions, with some seeing it as a way for Central Asia to assert its independence from Russia, while others remain skeptical of its feasibility.

The move reflects the changing geopolitical landscape in the region, with countries like Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan playing a more active role in promoting regional integration.
Central Asia...

...it won a ringing endorsement from a pro-government media outlet in Azerbaijan, a country that last month participated in rare Russia-free military drills with Central Asian countries in western Kazakhstan...

...”Since the war in Ukraine began, Central Asia has had a chance to reinvent itself in a comfortable geopolitical space,” said Luca Anceschi, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow.

“They are trying to say that they are not on Russia’s side in Ukraine, like Belarus is, but they are not with Ukraine either. They have ties with the West but are not pro-Western,” Anceschi told RFE/RL.

“But as the war goes on, as the discussion around secondary sanctions grows, perhaps the region’s governments see that this space is shrinking somewhat.”

All the more reason then, to emphasize regional integration on Central Asian terms, which is precisely what Toqaev did in an op-ed prefacing the sixth consultative meeting of the presidents of Central Asia in Astana on August 9...

...The main impetus towards closer cooperation in Central Asia has come from Uzbekistan, the region’s most populous country and the only one to share a border with every country in the region.

...(Uzbek President) Shavkat Mirziyoev saw fresh opportunities for trade and diplomatic unity when he came to power in 2016.

In an August 14 article on this topic, former Uzbek Foreign Minister and special presidential aide on foreign policy Abdulaziz Komilov wrote that Uzbekistan “had assumed a special responsibility for the future of Central Asia” by “completely abandoning outdated approaches to establishing relations with neighbors.”...

...the region’s countries have traditionally had stronger economic and political relationships with China and Russia than within the region.

So Toqaev’s op-ed on stronger regional ties, published by the state-run Kazakhstanskaya pravda — Central Asian Renaissance: Towards Sustainable Development And Prosperity — was bound to raise eyebrows.

Because beyond stressing Central Asia’s unique history and economic potential, Toqaev also called for “cooperation in defense and security” and even the “creation of a regional security architecture” that would include a “catalogue of security risks” for Central Asia.

These were naturally the parts of the op-ed noticed by commentators in Russia, whose war in Ukraine was referred to obliquely by the author in terms of instability on the region’s perimeter.

For pro-Kremlin nationalist television and radio personality Sergei Mardan, Toqaev’s words indicated that Kazakhstan had lost faith in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a Russian-dominated military bloc that includes the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan...

...A “defense union” was not the exact phrase used by Toqaev, who made sure to mention in his article he backed the participation of Central Asian states in a range of groupings, including the CSTO and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

But the idea of a Central Asian NATO was seized upon in other Russian commentaries about the Kazakh president’s article.

In the August 12 column titled Rats And Ships: “Central Asian Defense Union” Smells Of The British Pound And Delusion, published in the Asia-focused Vostochniy ekspress, author Fedor Kirsanov insisted that the apparent proposal for a new regional bloc likely originated with the British intelligence agency MI6.

“The union idea, predictably, was suggested by Toqaev, who has recently donned the toga of a political thinker,” Kirsanov wrote...

...Then there was the Russian-focused YouTube channel Khod Mysley (more than 450,000 subscribers), whose author questioned whether Toqaev was following Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian, who “under the leadership of the Anglo-Saxons, is slowly but surely turning Armenia from a friend of Russia into an enemy.”...

...But if Toqaev’s musings went down badly in Russia, they were praised in Baku by the privately owned Haqqin media outlet — which is often viewed as having close ties to hawks in the Azerbaijani regime...

...Toqaev’s concerns were “fully logical,” argued Novruzova, given Russia’s tendency toward militarism and the uncertainty of when and how the Ukraine war will end.

“All developments indicate that for the Kremlin elites, Russia’s peaceful development and the restoration of its economy are of no interest at all,” he said. “In other words, the Kremlin will not get on a peaceful track under the current regime — the machine of state aggression has been put in drive,” Novruzova wrote.

The view from Baku is even more interesting in light of both the Birlestik-2024 military drills that involved Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan in western Kazakhstan last month and the small-scale naval exercises involving Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan in Baku’s section of the Caspian Sea last year.

Azerbaijan — which shares Turkic heritage with four of the five Central Asian states — has become a source of admiration for some analysts in the region since Turkey-allied Baku reclaimed militarily the contested territory of Nagorno-Karabakh from nominal Russian partner Armenia.

And Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev attended the meeting of Central Asian leaders in Astana — the only head of state from outside the region to do so.

Nevertheless, argues Fuad Shahbazov, a Baku-based political analyst, nobody is really seeking out new Eurasian military alliances at this point.

“Azerbaijan believes that deepening ties with Central Asia gives it more room to maneuver,” Shahbazov said, noting that Baku is pursuing a similar drive with other countries against a souring of ties with the West and its traditionally complicated ties with Russia.

But in the long term, the analyst says, Azerbaijan views Central Asia through the prism of trade, specifically the Middle Corridor — a 6,500-kilometer trade route connecting China to Europe through Central Asia and the Caucasus but bypassing Russia — rather than security.

“With Kazakhstan, [Baku’s interest] is more about energy and logistics,” Shahbazov told RFE/RL.”

(China, might feed on a decaying Soviet Empire, but so might Turkey. The Turkic ‘stans must prepare to fend for themselves when a post-Imperial Russia might be curled up internally, licking its wounds, or fighting amongst itself, unable to be a security guarantor anymore.)

Schlumberger is still pumping Russian oil for Putin’s murder rampage.

Kyiv Independent reports:

“The Texas-based oilfield services company SLB is expanding its operations in Russia, filling the vacancy left by Western competitors, the Financial Times (FT) reported on Aug. 15.

SLB, previously known as Schlumberger, is the world’s largest offshore drilling company. It continued to operate in Russia after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, even as other oil giants left the country.

SLB’s Russian subsidiary signed new contracts and posted over 1,000 job postings within the last year, the FT reports.

The nonprofit organization Global Witness obtained documents, seen by the FT, that show SLB in December 2023 entered into a contract with Vnigni, a Russian state-funded institution that conducts geological research for fossil fuel production.

The company has advertised over 1,000 new jobs in Russia since December 2023. Open positions include drivers, chemists, and geologists.

Russian corporate databases also show that SLB registered two new trademarks in July 2024.

SLB announced in July 2023 that it would immediately stop all shipments of products and technology from its facilities into Russia in response to growing sanctions on the Russian oil industry. In their announcement, SLB joined “the international community in condemning and calling for an end to the war in Ukraine.”

Russian customs filings show that while SLB did stop importing supplies from its facilities abroad, it continued to import products and technology from other sources. Of $17.5 million in equipment shipped between August and December 2023, $2.2 million was declared to have originally been manufactured by SLB.

Ukraine’s National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP) has labeled SLB an “international sponsor of war” for its continued business in Russia.”