When Kazakhstan's President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev sat beside Vladimir Putin in Omsk recently and suggested that it might be time to freeze the war in Ukraine and return to negotiations, his words attracted attention well beyond Central Asia. They were notable not simply because they were spoken in Putin's presence, but because of what they revealed about a region that has spent more than three decades quietly redefining its place in the world.
Tokayev's intervention was about Ukraine. But it was also about something larger.
It was about sovereignty, strategic uncertainty and the gradual emergence of states that once existed within a single Soviet system but have spent the past thirty-five years learning how to operate on their own. I have watched that evolution from relatively close range.
My first encounters with the peoples of the Soviet Union came when I was a teenager. During a grain shortage in the Soviet Union, American grain was loaded onto Soviet merchant ships in New York. My father worked for a company responsible for arranging the arrival, departure and loading of those vessels, and occasionally I accompanied him aboard.
I remember sitting in the captain's stateroom and looking around the table. Some of the officers looked Russian. Others had darker hair, brown eyes and olive complexions. There were fair-haired men and darker-skinned men, people who appeared distinctly different from one another.
My father explained something that, at fifteen, I had never really considered: the Soviet Union wasn't simply Russia. It contained many nationalities, and the composition of that ship reflected the enormous diversity of the country.
More than twenty years later, I would encounter that diversity again, this time as an FBI Special Agent and Legal Attaché in Moscow. I worked with Russian officials of many backgrounds—Tatar, Georgian, Chechen, Armenian, Kazakh and Uzbek among them.
My understanding of the Soviet Union, and later of the space it left behind, was expanding. Eventually, I was assigned to Kazakhstan to establish the FBI's first Legal Attaché office responsible for Central Asia—the five newly independent states of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. I was based in Almaty.
That assignment changed my understanding of the former Soviet Union more profoundly than anything I had experienced before. The similarities were obvious. Russian remained widely spoken. Government institutions, laws and administrative practices retained the unmistakable imprint of the Soviet system. In many places, that system remained remarkably intact years after the Soviet Union itself had disappeared.
But the differences were just as striking. Travel outside the major cities and Russian became less useful. In some smaller towns and villages, virtually no one spoke it. Each community had its own traditions, food, customs and history—and people were proud to explain them.
The region was also extraordinarily diverse. Intermarriage was common. People of different ethnic backgrounds lived alongside one another. I found that aspect of Central Asian society surprisingly familiar. It reminded me, in some respects, of the United States: different peoples sharing the same space without necessarily surrendering their individual identities.
I also witnessed a gradual change in who occupied positions of authority. When I first began working in the region, many senior positions were still held by ethnic Russians. Over time, that changed. I did not see this principally as Russians being pushed out. Rather, local populations were finally finding room to advance within political and administrative systems in which Russians had long enjoyed structural advantages.
That distinction matters. The transformation of Central Asia was not simply a rejection of Russia. It was something more complicated: the emergence of national identities and institutions that had previously been constrained by a larger imperial system. And that process was occurring against a difficult backdrop.
The collapse of the Soviet Union had left behind organized crime, terrorism, corruption, unemployment, deteriorating infrastructure and weakened health-care and economic systems. Formerly administrative boundaries had suddenly become international borders. Countries that had never needed to negotiate their borders with one another now had to delimit and demarcate them.
Ethnic enclaves became potential flashpoints. Communities fought over water, land and other resources. Smaller towns and villages emptied as services that had once been provided by the Soviet state disappeared.
I remember visiting a small town outside Dushanbe that reminded me of a Bavarian mountain village. In another era it must have been a beautiful place to live, nestled in the foothills. Years of neglect and flooding had left behind little more than the skeleton of that community.
It was not an isolated example.
Throughout Central Asia, the dissolution of one political and economic system created a vacuum that the newly independent states had to fill while simultaneously learning how to govern themselves.
Yet something else was happening.
The people I worked with were not simply waiting for someone else to provide the answers. They were eager to learn. Law-enforcement and border officials recognized that the old system was no longer adequate. They understood that reform was necessary. I saw this repeatedly.
One of the areas in which I became particularly involved was border security. Borders that had once existed largely as administrative lines now mattered enormously. They needed to be negotiated, marked and managed. Cross-border crime had to be addressed. Terrorist movements had to be identified. Communities divided by newly established international boundaries had to continue interacting with one another. Cooperation became a necessity.
Some of the work I am proudest of involved helping establish a multinational, multi-agency mobile training team to identify potential foreign terrorist fighters and detect their movement across borders. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and other participating agencies worked together in a manner that was remarkable to witness.
It was not an alliance. It was not an ideological project. It was practical cooperation because the countries shared common problems.
I encountered the same spirit years later while working with the OSCE, when we developed specialized training to help law-enforcement and border-security personnel combat the illicit trafficking of cultural property. Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Kazakhs and Afghans sat together in the same room discussing the looting and destruction of the region's cultural heritage. They were not discussing geopolitics. They were discussing problems that crossed borders. That distinction may become increasingly important.
For decades, Russia served as the dominant organizing power across much of the former Soviet space. Moscow provided the political, economic, security and institutional framework within which many of these states operated. That world no longer exists in the same way. The war in Ukraine has made that reality much harder to ignore.
For the Central Asian states, the question is not necessarily whether to turn away from Russia. Geography alone makes that impossible. Their economies, transportation routes, energy systems, security relationships and populations remain deeply connected to Russia.
Nor is the answer to choose another great power and simply substitute one dependency for another.
The more important question is whether these states can create enough space of their own to protect their sovereignty and manage their shared vulnerabilities. They have already demonstrated that they can cooperate when circumstances require it.
Perhaps it is time to institutionalize that practice.
The Central Asian states could benefit from a forum of their own, built around practical cooperation rather than great-power rivalry. Such a mechanism would not be NATO. It would not be an anti-Russian bloc. It would not attempt to create a new sphere of influence. It could be considerably less ambitious—and potentially more useful.
A rotating chair, perhaps initially hosted by Kazakhstan, could bring participating states together to address challenges and concerns they all share: border management, terrorism, organized crime, critical infrastructure, transportation corridors, energy security, migration, cultural heritage along vulnerable frontier regions, water and other transboundary resources, and natural disasters.
The objective would be simple: create a place where sovereign states can talk to one another about their own problems before those problems become crises. That may sound modest. But after spending years working in the region, I have learned that modest, practical cooperation can accomplish considerably more than grand declarations.
The Central Asian states have spent decades learning how to operate in the shadow of larger powers. They have also learned that cooperation with one another is not merely desirable—it is sometimes essential.
Tokayev's recent remarks to Putin therefore deserve to be considered in a broader context. His message was not necessarily that Kazakhstan had chosen sides. It was something more subtle. Kazakhstan can maintain strategic relations with Russia while simultaneously asserting that it has its own interests, its own assessment of events and its own sovereign voice. That is the larger story unfolding across Central Asia.
I saw the beginnings of it when I first arrived in Almaty. I saw it in the officials I worked with, in the border officers learning to manage international boundaries that had never previously existed, and in communities rediscovering identities that had been restrained beneath a common Soviet structure.
I saw it in Dushanbe, where people remembered a Soviet past that was not entirely negative. They remembered clean air, mountain water, fresh food, public facilities and a relatively comfortable life far from Moscow. The Soviet experience was not remembered in simple black-and-white terms. History rarely is. But nostalgia for aspects of the past does not mean a desire to return to it. The people of Central Asia have spent thirty-five years building something else. The challenge now is to ensure that they have the institutional space to protect it.
The war in Ukraine has changed more than the security environment in Europe. It has exposed vulnerabilities in the political, economic and transportation systems connecting the former Soviet republics. It has demonstrated the risks of excessive dependence on a single dominant power. And it has accelerated a question that Central Asian states have been quietly confronting for years:
What does sovereignty mean when geography, economics and history continue to tie you to a much larger neighbor?
There is no easy answer. But there may be a practical one. The former Soviet republics do not need to choose between Moscow, Washington, Beijing or anyone else. They need the ability to cooperate with all of them while preserving the freedom to pursue their own interests.
That requires space. It requires communication. And, perhaps most importantly, it requires institutions capable of giving smaller sovereign states a collective voice when their interests overlap.
Central Asia has already shown that it can build such cooperation from the ground up. I was fortunate enough to witness—and occasionally participate in—some of those efforts. Now, after more than three decades of independence, perhaps the time has come for the states of Central Asia to take the next step.
Not away from Russia. Not toward another great power. But toward one another. They have spent generations living inside someone else's strategic architecture. Perhaps it is finally time to build a little architecture of their own.
Dennis T. Cosgrove is a former FBI Special Agent and Legal Attaché, and former Head of the Border Security and Management Unit at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in Vienna. He worked extensively in Central Asia, the former Soviet Union, and the Balkans in a variety of law enforcement, diplomatic, and international security roles, including numerous assignments with U.S. Embassies overseas. He writes on geopolitics, transnational threats, and strategic affairs, and is the author of two published books with a third currently in progress.
