The celebrations for May 9, the anniversary of the victory in what in Russia is called the Great Patriotic War, have been held in Moscow for ten years now without Western participation. Since the change of regime in Kiev in 2014, which was followed by the annexation of Crimea and the start of the first war in Donbass, the fracture between Russia on the one hand and Europe and the United States on the other has progressively widened and the victory on the Nazi-fascism of 1945, Soviet and allied, is celebrated separately. For the third time the anniversary falls with the ongoing war in Ukraine, described by Vladimir Putin along the lines of that of the last century, as a sort of existential battle for Moscow against its worst enemy, this time represented by the Western coalition supporting Kiev.
The commemorations in Red Square, although limited compared to the past for reasons ranging from internal security to the international situation, remain an opportunity for the Kremlin to demonstrate on the one hand its military strength, on the other the fact that Russia, although isolated in the West, it remains the major “player” in the post-Soviet space. From this perspective, it is relevant that all the leaders of the five republics of the former USSR in Central Asia are present in Moscow: Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev (Kazakhstan), Shavkat Mirziyoev (Uzbekistan), Emomali Rahmon (Tajikistan), Sadyr Japarov (Kyrgyzstan) and Serdar Berdymukhammedov (Turkmenistan).
May 9th does not only have a symbolic value for the shared past, with the Soviet victory of 79 years ago which has always left a heavy legacy in all countries of the former USSR due to the enormous toll paid in human lives (around 20 million of deaths between 1941 and 1945), but also for the present: the project of the reconstruction of a new alliance built on the ashes of the Soviet Union which collapsed in 1991 was and is one of those that Putin attempted to implement during almost five decades in the Kremlin.
The creation of the Eurasian Union ten years ago, with the participation of Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Armenia, should have been the beginning of greater integration, primarily economic, also with the other Central Asian countries and the Caucasus, but it stalled due to the Ukrainian crisis, which on the one hand slowed down the Russian plan and on the other shifted the priorities of the respective countries. If Moscow, even after the start of the large-scale conflict with Kiev, took its gaze away from the Caucasus, its gaze on the “Stans” instead intensified.
The five Central Asian republics have maintained good relations with Russia and, too far from Europe to be co-opted by the various Western alliances, have remained alongside Moscow, both with solid bilateral relations and within the various post-Soviet organizations, such as the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States), CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization), SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization). Above all, the latter, driven by Moscow and Beijing, founded in the 1990s at the time of Boris Yeltsin and Jang Zemin with the aim of overcoming the post-Cold War US uni-polarity, represents the link between post-Soviet Russia and China in the perspective of a Eurasian bloc as opposed to the Western one.
Alongside major players such as China, India or Turkey, the latter a member of NATO, which did not join the sanctions against Moscow by the European Union and the United States, the countries of Central Asia have also taken on a fundamental role for the economy Russian, becoming the sorting centers for goods arriving and leaving Russia. Not only that: even the republics of the Caucasus which in recent years have seen political relations with Moscow worsen, such as Armenia and Georgia, have participated at an economic and commercial level in the game of circumventing Western restrictive measures which has nevertheless positively influenced their respective economies . Ultimately, the Kremlin’s influence remains very high, especially in the “Stans”, where however it suffers competition from Beijing. But overall, after the initial shock of the invasion of Ukraine, ties between Russia and the Central Asian countries seem to have mended in the name of pragmatism.
