Kyiv, Ukraine – Almost two years ago, a dozen Uzbek youngsters pleaded with their president to save them from the horrors of the Russian-Ukrainian war.
Uzbek nationals enrolled in western Russia’s Kursk Medical University recorded a video address to Shavkat Mirziyoyev in October 2022 saying their studies had been affected by Kyiv’s shelling of nearby towns and the hostilities in the neighbouring Ukrainian region of Sumy.
“Please transfer us to medical schools in Uzbekistan,” one of the students said. Uzbek diplomats pledged to assess the situation.
There have been no further reports about their fate – just like Uzbekistan’s official response to one of the war’s most daring developments – Kyiv’s incursion into Kursk.
Since August 6, Ukrainian forces have reportedly occupied dozens of villages and hamlets on more than 1,000 square kilometres (386 square miles) and captured Russian servicemen.
Uzbekistan had to respond – according to the letter of the Collective Security Treaty (CST), a military accord Tashkent signed with Russia, its Central Asian neighbours Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and Belarus.
‘They obviously wouldn’t go to Kursk’
But only one of their leaders, the Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, has so far commented on the Kursk offensive.
“Let’s sit down and end this fight. Neither Ukrainian people, nor Russians or Belarusians need it,” he told the Rossiya television network on Thursday, claiming that only Washington “benefits” from the war.
On Saturday, Lukashenko ordered a deployment of troops to the Belarusian border with Ukraine. Belarusian state-controlled television showed tanks and missiles loaded onto trains.
But Ukrainian defence analyst Vladislav Seleznyov told the RBK Ukraine news agency that the deployment was a “trick” and that arms and troops did not, in fact, reach the border.
Leaders of other CST member states did not say a word about the Kursk incursion – and have not offered any military aid to Russia.
“Moscow wouldn’t mind if the forces [of CST member states] could contribute to solving its problems, but they obviously wouldn’t go to Kursk even if summoned,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University, told Al Jazeera.
A CST member state has to ask for military aid from other pact members. Moscow did not, because it would be tantamount to Putin’s admission of political and military weakness, observers say.
“If [Ukraine’s] successful military operation in Kursk was a slap to Putin, then the invitation of CST [forces] would be a second slap,” Dosym Satpayev, an analyst based in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s financial centre, told Al Jazeera.
“The CST was actively advertised as a structure where Russia is the main security umbrella for all member states,” Satpayev said.
Since day one of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the nations of Central Asia and Transcaucasus – including Armenia, that suspended its CST membership, assumed an “ostrich position”, Satpayev said.
They forbade their nationals to fight for either side and pledged to stick to Western sanctions slapped on Moscow.
But the sanctions malfunction because thousands of companies in ex-Soviet republics profit from re-exporting dual purpose goods such as microchips and semiconductors to Russia.
Meanwhile, the number of Russian companies in Kazakhstan alone tripled from 7,000 in 2019 to more than 20,000 in 2024, Satpayev said.
Wartime balancing acts
Western efforts to plant democracy in Central Asia in the 1990s largely failed, and regional leaders pragmatically balance between Moscow, Beijing and, increasingly, Ankara.
“Ukraine’s example shows that when you have an aggressive neighbour such as Russia, you have to always keep your powder dry,” Satpayev said.
The balancing act, however, runs counter to public opinion in the region.
Russia’s soft power and the dominance of Moscow-controlled media that propagate anti-Ukrainian and anti-Western views uphold pro-Kremlin sentiment.
“Things are very harsh these days – you either root for the US and their policies, or for Russia,” a businessman in Almaty who requested anonymity told Al Jazeera.
The Kremlin’s narrative “nailed one idea in our heads – America is the enemy – sly, duplicitous, full of lies”, he said.
Putin has downplayed the gravity of the Kursk invasion.
Instead of calling it an act of war or invasion, he has dubbed the push against Ukraine’s cross-border assault as a “counterterrorism operation”.
The term was the Kremlin’s preferred euphemism for the second war in Chechnya that began in 1999 and resulted in war crimes and human rights abuses on both sides.
The Kremlin is “trying to silence what’s happening [in Kursk], and its allies do the same”, said Temur Umarov, an Uzbekistan-born expert with Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, a think tank in Berlin.
“As long as Russia’s political regime isn’t under threat, no one is going to think about expressing a definite position, because such a position limits wiggle room,” he told Al Jazeera.
The term “counterterrorism situation” also maintains Putin’s legitimacy for average Russians, said Alisher Ilkhamov, head of Central Asia Due Diligence, a London-based think tank.
Meanwhile, Putin signals that he “wouldn’t use nuclear arms as a weapon of retribution and doesn’t see the Ukrainian offensive as a pretext to escalate the conflict with the West,” Ilkhamov told Al Jazeera.
Putin’s stance “gives Central Asian nations a chance to sigh with relief and frees them from the need to stand up to protect their CST ally,” he said.
Meanwhile, “counterterrorism operations” are something Russian regions have been used to for decades – especially the Northern Caucasus.
But those who survived such “operations” have nothing but harrowing memories.
“The very term makes me convulse,” Madina, a Chechen refugee living in a European nation, told Al Jazeera.
She claimed that during the second Chechen war, Russian soldiers killed her older brother and two cousins, maimed her father, and destroyed the apartment building they lived in.
“I really, really pity those who live in the counterterrorism zone in Kursk,” Madina, who withheld her last name and location because her relatives still live in Chechnya, told Al Jazeera.
