Days after Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev publicly suggested to Russian President Vladimir Putin that he freeze the conflict with Ukraine and return to the negotiating table, Putin signed a pair of executive orders paving the way to begin talks with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to update their existing military-technical cooperation agreements.
These two events are not necessarily connected, but viewed together they serve to highlight the multidimensional relationships between the Central Asian states and Russia.
Tokayev met Putin in the Siberian city of Omsk for the Russia-Kazakhstan Forum of Interregional Cooperation on July 24-25. Speaking alongside Putin at the forum, Tokayev urged his Russian counterpart to return to the negotiating table.
“Perhaps it’s time to put this conflict on hold and return to the Istanbul 2.0 formula, since significant results have been achieved there,” Tokayev said, referring to talks hosted in the Turkish capital in March 2022 – shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion began – and again in May 2025.
That first round of talks in Istanbul in 2022, as Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko wrote in a 2024 article for Foreign Affairs, could have ended the war – but didn’t.
