“Propagandists like Keosayan have no personal opinion”
Caliber.Az interview with Arman Shurayev

INTERVIEWS  28 April 2022 - 19:30

Caliber.Az presents an interview with Arman Shurayev, a Kazakh journalist and public figure.

- Tigran Keosayan, the husband of Russian-Armenian propagandist Margarita Simonyan, has recently made offensive remarks regarding Kazakhstan on his YouTube channel. Considering the status of his wife, do you think this was his personal opinion or was he following a certain political order?

- Undoubtedly, it was a political order, because propagandists like Keosayan have no personal opinion. He and similar propagandists are fulfilling a political order. It is obvious that the Kremlin is dissatisfied with the fact that Kazakhstan's leadership, first, refused to participate in the war in Ukraine within the CSTO (the Collective Security Treaty Organization), which Moscow very much desired. Also, Kazakhstan's leadership refused to call this war a "special operation".

Second, the vast majority of Kazakhs take the side of Ukraine in this conflict. This is evidenced by the numerous rallies and actions of support for Ukraine that took place in Kazakhstan in the first days of the war. Over 5,000 people gathered in Almaty alone. Then, as part of a civil action in Kazakhstan, humanitarian aid was collected for Ukraine. In a very short time, it was possible to collect about $3 million, half of this amount was money, and the rest was medicine, food and necessities, baby stuff, etc. And to this day, there are support offices for Ukraine in almost every city in Kazakhstan.

Of course, all this began to strain the Russian government, which believes that Kazakhstan a priori must be in the zone of Russian influence, in other words on the side of the Russian regime. Therefore, Tigran Keosayan and his wife Margarita Simonyan, who has also previously dragged Kazakhstan through dirt, - are links in a chain.

- What measures do you think the Kazakh authorities or law enforcement agencies should take in response to this caddish outburst by Keosayan?

- A spokesman of the Kazakh Foreign Ministry has already said that it "does not exclude the possibility of banning the Russian TV presenter and film director Tigran Keosayan from entering the country". Unfortunately, our law enforcement agencies, unlike the General Prosecutor's Office of Azerbaijan, are still afraid of their own shadow. They should have launched at least criminal proceedings and put propagandists like Keosayan, who insult the people of Kazakhstan, on the international wanted list. However, unfortunately, there have been no such cases so far.

- What does the Kazakh population think about it?

- I can confidently say that Russia with the hands of its propagandists is cutting its own throat. Because Kazakhstan was one of few countries with which Russia had relatively normal relations. But every such statement increases the gap between the people of Kazakhstan and Russia. Even those Kazakhs who were more or less loyal to Russia and at the beginning of the war in Ukraine even supported Moscow's position have now turned away from it. They also realized that the Russian occupiers can be confidently compared with the fascists of Hitler's Germany. Thus, Russia is losing even those few people who supported its policies and sympathized with it. The number of such people in Kazakhstan is shrinking daily.

- But Russia and Kazakhstan are also allies in the CSTO and partners in the EAEU...

- The Russian-Kazakhstan relations today can hardly be called partner relations. On the one hand, against the background of anti-Russian sanctions, further cooperation with Russia may be interpreted by the Western community as an unfriendly step towards it. Therefore, it is unlikely that Kazakhstan will help Russia, even at the unofficial level.

On the other hand, almost half of Kazakhstan's government is composed of graduates of Russian universities. Unfortunately, in Kazakhstan, unlike in Azerbaijan, there are many Kazakhs in the government, who not only do not know but also treat their native language with contempt. And they still gravitate to Russia. A lot of appointments to high positions are still coordinated with the Kremlin. So, I would distinguish between the relations of regimes and those of ordinary people. For example, in January 2022, when the president of Kazakhstan called the CSTO forces, which included the Russian army, they came to save the regime, not the people.

As for the common people, as I said earlier, the gap between us is growing day by day.

- Aren't you afraid that the Ukrainian scenario is likely to repeat in Kazakhstan?

- The scenario, similar to the Ukrainian one, can be repeated anywhere because Russia does not need strong neighbors, it needs its neighbors to live twice as bad as they do.

This time, Russia has lost more than $2 trillion because of sanctions and military actions, and this money could have been used to make Russia one of the world's leading economies. But the Russian leadership chose a different path. So, today, the Ukrainians have taken a hit that Kazakhstan could well have taken itself. And now Ukraine is fighting, among other things, for the future of all the post-Soviet countries that Russia is trying to keep in its orbit. I think this scenario is likely if Russia manages to end the war with victory. But fortunately for all of us, Ukraine demonstrates the highest examples of courage and fortitude. I think Ukraine did manage to put down half of Russia's military power, and now Moscow will have a very long time to recover. If the war lasts another year, I think the collapse of Russia will be a very realistic scenario. Because our brothers Bashkirs, Tatars, Yakuts and other nations of Russia have the right to self-determination which the Kremlin hides behind when it conducts all kinds of referendums in occupied Ossetia, Abkhazia and Ukraine.

The South Caucasus is also at risk because Russia is an ally of Armenia. I think that Russia needs to keep the South Caucasus countries up, so it will continue to pursue its bloody policy. But the examples of Ukraine and especially Azerbaijan, which managed to return its native lands in 44 days, showed that the Russian Federation is not really the second army in the world for a long time. That both the president and the people of Russia have become victims of their own propaganda machine, in particular its representatives such as Keosayan.

Caliber.Az