Kazakhstan fuel protests/insurrection...

dowie

dowie

dowie

Caporegime
Joined
29 Jan 2008
Posts
59,129
Makes the rioters in some other countries look rather tame in comparison!

Main government building stormed:


...and set on fire!

Vyd1VsJ.jpg


the internet has been shut down for the whole country:


some police siding with the protestors:


some more footage of the protests:


This sort of thing is why Putin is paranoid about Ukraine.
 
Jokester said:
Got to think this will get very messy if they don't quieten down with the arrival of Russian troops.
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Thing is it's a well-armed population and a very sparsely populated county (like the size of Western Europe but the population is like < 20 million) - could be a serious headache for Russia if it dragged on.

Kazakh army only has 20,000 troops and we've already seen police forces just give up or switch to supporting protestors within 24 hours. This started as a fuel protest but with regimes like this there are always going to be a bunch of underlying grievances and I guess the fule protest was the spark they needed.
 
Russian troops deploying there are the same units that took over Crimea:


(some twitter commentators are getting a bit excited over that with claims that Russia is trying to annex Kazakhstan, that seems like quite a reach right now - population of Crimea is circa 1/10th of the size and obvs Crimea is significantly smaller - would require rather more troops to annex/occupy the country)

Sadly some protestors were killed, footage of troops seemingly firing live ammunition:


more shooting here:

 
Putin won't be happy with these demands:


mattyfez said:
Putin won't allow it, ex-soviet states that Russia belives are spritualy part of mother Russia. I expect the Russian army to hit this very hard, especialy as the Kazak government dictatorship requested thier assistance.
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Putin won't like it, whether he's able to stop it or not is another matter, could be very hard if significant popular support for change.
 
Enkore said:
Interesting to see so little coverage in the western media. Putin literally deployed his army there to supress the protestors. Although, I would not call a lot of them protestors, the videos I saw show people trashing everything and arming themselves to the teeth with weapons.

Those protestors are more like militia at this point as they are literally giving full blown military a hard time as they are firing back. There is literally full blown war on streets in some of those cities and the army is attempting to squash armed militias.

It looks like Kazakh army folded over so quickly that they had to get Russians in.
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It seems the Kazakh’s are better armed in general than say the Belarusians. This could be a serious headache for Putin if it continues, if he cracks down too hard then he’ll just encourage more to rise up.

Part of the protest does seem to involve pushing back against Russia and this is a well educated population, might not be so easy to suppress now this has started.
 
Soldiers can now fire without warning:


Kazakhstan's authoritarian leader says he has ordered security forces to "fire without warning", amid a violent crackdown on anti-government protests.

President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev also said "20,000 bandits" had attacked the main city of Almaty, the epicentre of protests sparked by a fuel price hike.

He blamed foreign-trained "terrorists", without giving evidence.

The interior ministry says 26 "armed criminals" and 18 security officers have been killed so far in the unrest.
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