Mirathecat22 t1_iybmbkm wrote on November 30, 2022 at 4:35 AM

I’m willing to bet neither want to be in partnership with Russia when they can do better without them.

And with Russias weakening global position both politically and militarily the threat of an invasion like Ukraine isn’t as likely, and they know they’d get support from western backed countries in the same event.

It’s an interesting time.

Morfildur t1_iyc7xy0 wrote on November 30, 2022 at 8:53 AM

Both countries are in a difficult spot. They have plenty of resources, but they're essentially land-locked, so exporting those resources is very difficult.

It would make sense that they're looking for neighbours to export through and for those the only one's with sea access for large scale global exports are Russia, China and (via the caspian sea) Iran. Not exactly the best partners to have.

The closest Chinese sea port is around 3000km from their border. The closest Russian sea port is less than 1000km away.

They have the choice of not exporting and staying poor or making a deal with one of the devils around them.

Mirathecat22 t1_iycdioz wrote on November 30, 2022 at 10:16 AM

I don’t disagree here, however Kazakhstan at the very least has already been shipping oil/gas (I don’t specifically remember which natural resource it was) through to Azerbaijan, while I don’t like Azerbaijan too much (mainly their government) it can be a big step in the right direction away from Russia for multiple countries. Especially if Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan want to move away from Russias influence, and recent times suggest they do, especially Kazakhstan moving away from the Cyrillic alphabet in favour of the Latin alphabet.