Why Putin Just Raised a Massive Army Back From the Dead

The Daily Beast ^ | January 7, 2022 | Anna Nemtsova

[Dr. Franklin]

MOSCOW—The sixth day of violent unrest devolved into a massacre on the streets of Kazakhstan’s capital city of Almaty, with dozens of protesters and at least 13 law enforcement officials killed, as well as hundreds more wounded.

President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev—who just a week ago was considered a weak shadow of Kazakhstan’s now-ousted Security Council Chairman Narsultan Nazarbayev—admitted he was the one who had given local security forces the order “to shoot to kill” protestors without warning on Thursday. Never before has any post-Soviet leader confessed to such a terrifying order.

A day prior to Thursday’s bloodshed, Tokayev had claimed he was fighting against “international terrorist gangs,” referring to the Kazakh demonstrators who had taken to the streets this week to protest social and economic turmoil in the country. The president said that local security forces had failed control the situation, and admitted he had asked the the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO)—a Russian-led military alliance with a “peacekeeping force” of 3,600 troops—to help quell the unrest, which is looking more and more like it could spiral into a civil war. The CSTO obliged, with Russian troops arriving on Thursday.

“Tokayev needed CSTO as club to demonstrate to his commanders that, ‘See, Moscow backs me up, there is a Russian soldier that stands next to you shoulder to shoulder,’” pro-Kremlin political expert Sergei Markov told The Daily Beast on Thursday, as Russian special units were boarding military jets enroute to Almaty. “This is the first time CSTO forces get deployed to a foreign state, and it’s a message to Washington: Vladimir Putin has his own effective NATO capable of fulfilling military tasks.”

[Wuli]

I learned in a news report today that (1) 18% of Bitcoin mining runs on Bitcoin farms in ............. Kazakhstan (making Kazakhstan the 2nd largest holder of Bitcoin mining farms), and (2) that mining was shut down with the shut down of the Internet in Kazakhstan yesterday, with Bitcoin dropping to a values last seen in September.

Is there any relationship between the crypto currencies, sovereign nations concerns about them and the events in Kazakhstan, or is Bitcoin merely a temporary casualty of events that have nothing to do with it, one wonders.

[mac_truck]

Nuland told them that 100 dead are needed for the West to support ouster of Yanukovich.

I don't think Victoria Nuland was directly involved in that event...she's too smart a cookie.

These two guys however have blood on their hands.

[Svartalfiar]

There are a few other threads on this topic, but the important point from this article is that that an illegitimate government claims that it is fighting not its own people, but “international terrorist gangs”.

What makes him an "illegitimate government"? Isn't he the elected President? The protests aren't against his election, they're just generic social/economic protests, correct?