Kazakhstan has tried to maintain good relations with both Russia and Western countries.
The Russian army, waging a war of aggression in Ukraine, gets the military technology it needs with the help of its close ally Kazakhstan.
The matter is revealed by the journalists’ organization of OCCRP (you switch to another service)an online publication of Russian investigative journalists iStories (you switch to another service) and German Der Spiegel (you will switch to another service) from the research. According to it, the Russians have recently established several companies in Kazakhstan, through which military technology is exported to Russia.
Investigative journalists reviewed Kazakhstan’s trade statistics from last year. The statistics suggest that drones and advanced microchips, among other things, flow to Russia through Kazakhstan. Thus, with the help of its Central Asian ally, Russia is able to circumvent the sanctions imposed on it by the West.
Trade data shows that drones worth almost five million dollars were imported to Kazakhstan last year, mainly from China. Before Russia launched its full-scale war in Ukraine last year, so few drones were imported into Kazakhstan that they were not even recorded in the country’s export and import statistics.
The import of microchips to Kazakhstan, on the other hand, more than doubled last year and their import value reached more than 75 million dollars. At the same time, microchips flowed into Russia from Kazakhstan 70 times more than a year earlier.
Kazakhstan has tried to maintain good relations with both Russia and Western countries. The country’s foreign minister Mukhtar Tileuberdi commented on the situation in February at a joint press conference of the US Secretary of State by Antony Blinken with in the capital Astana.
The then foreign minister Tileuberdi stated that Kazakhstan is trying to avoid a situation in which it would help circumvent the sanctions imposed on Russia by the West. However, he emphasized that this is very difficult, as both Russia and Kazakhstan belong to the Eurasian Economic Union, and therefore there are no customs inspections between the countries.