On February 3, 2016, Kazakhstan’s president Nursultan Nazarbayev made a symbolically powerful decree on how Kazakh soldiers should march during military parades. The abolition of the Soviet goose step formation, utilized by Russia, was a striking display of the Kazakh military’s increasingly independent identity. As Georgia in 2007 and Estonia in 2008 abolished the formation during periods of tense relations with Russia, Nazarbayev’s decision raised fresh questions about the strength of the long-standing Russia-Kazakhstan partnership. Kazakhstan’s accession to the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) in 2015 has been followed paradoxically by escalating anti-Kremlin defiance from Almaty. Over the past …read more
Source: The Huffington Post
