Page 54 - bneMag Oct23

54 I Eurasia bne October 2023
Vladimir Putin's mobilisation drive announced in September 2022 provoked a mad dash for the border among many Russians. / Marcel Crozet / ILO
How many of the Russians who fled Putin’s war machine for Kazakhstan stayed there?
Nizom Khodjayev in Almaty
By some accounts, towards half
a million Russians flooded across Russia’s long border with Kazakhstan roughly a year ago when Vladimir Putin announced a partial military mobilisation to add soldiers to the war effort in Ukraine. So where are they now? How many stayed, how many moved on to third countries and how many returned to Russia?
Good questions all, but the mish-mash of statistics released by the Kazakh authorities, combined with the dubious numbers offered by Russian diplomats, make answering them a hopeless
task. Kazakh officials release sets of figures lacking clarity and out of step with the various realities painted by observers with something to say on the matter. And they are in no hurry
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to clear things up. The issue of Russian men of fighting age in Kazakhstan is something of a hot potato. Quite apart from Moscow frowning on any country that allows itself to be seen as relaxed about Russians escaping the draft, there are the frustrations of Kazakh citizens for whom the influx triggered by the mobilisation brought surges in consumer prices and rents as the newly arrived Russians sought to establish expatriate lives. For Kazakhstan’s Tokayev administration, the less said about all of this, the better.
Lacking the requisite statistics to pursue this article in the direction originally envisaged, your correspondent pushed the work on picking through statistical discrepancies to one side and went out to speak to some Russian expats in Almaty
to try to obtain a useful picture of the situation as it stands.
One issue that came up again and again was a Kazakh government resolution that became effective from late January. The resolution closed a loophole in the stay permitting process that essentially allowed foreign individuals unbroken indefinite stays in the country. The resolution, hitting not only Russians, but also citizens of other member nations
of the Moscow-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), means that after the expiry of a stay permit, the permit holder
is required to leave Kazakhstan for a minimum of 90 days before potentially qualifying for another stay.
One Russian citizen, who gave the name Andrey, indicated that Russian expats