On the eve of the Russia-NATO talks over Ukraine, a spanner seems to have been thrown into the works with the Kazakhstan revolt and Russian military intervention that's followed.

The initial conventional wisdom was that Vladimir Putin has now got his hands full and won't be invading Ukraine any time soon.

It's dubious. Seems to me that the 3,000 troops Russia sent are kind of piddly, given the million-strong size of the Russian army. Three thousand troops is about the same size of the U.S. troop count that the U.S. had been keeping inside Afghanistan to prevent the place from becoming a hellhole, back when President Trump was in office. Even the foreign policy establishment, these characters who tell the Bidenites what to think, have lately been changing that forcast. I checked Foreign Policy.  

The real problem seems to be in Russia's perception of who started the revolt, which may well lead to Joe Biden, shattering any good will Putin may have had in cooperating with NATO on Ukraine, as well as any leverage with Russia that the U.S. might have.

If so, thanks a lot, Joe.

In a nutshell, the Russians think Joe Biden did it, throwing out the Kazakhstan revolt like a stun-grenade distraction to draw Russian attention away from Ukraine and thus keep the Russians from invading the place. Russian troops have been massing along the Ukraine border for months now, and U.S. intelligence officials have forecast an invasion sometime early this year. The Bidenites don't actually know what to do about it, given that Putin saw their military 'brilliance' up close in the catastrophic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, as well as the Bidenites' wokester military focus, hunting "terrorists" in its own ranks. With this crap going on, Putin knows he has nothing to fear from Joe Biden, so now's the time for an invasion if that's what he wants. From Russia's point of view, eastern Ukraine at least, is already pretty much is Russia anyway, and the U.S. doesn't keep its promises on Russian security, as AT contributors Alexander Markovsky and Ted Belman have noted here.

But Kazakhstan complicates that best-laid plan. It's as if someone wants the Russians to be kept busy putting out dumpster fires over in the scruffy 'stans bordering its eastern hinterlands so that it can't contemplate taking back Ukraine.

Clint Ehrlich, who identifies himself as a computer scientist and lawyer, and seems to have had contractual ties with Russia, as well as a Russian perch, has a very interesting perspective arguing it may well be that Joe's the one doing this:

Here is the beginning of Ehrlich's sequence of tweets on Twitter:

The situation in Kazakhstan is a much bigger deal than Western media is letting on.

I believe it significantly increases the risk of NATO-Russia conflict.

Here is my report from Moscow. A MEGA-thread... 🧵

— Clint Ehrlich (@ClintEhrlich) January 7, 2022

Or, you can read ZeroHedge's excellent summary of the tweets here.

Ehrlich starts by pointing out Russia's vital interests in Kazakhstan -- in uranium, in rocket launches, in the two countries' gargantuan shared border with the prospect of Kazakh refugees flooding into Russia if there's real trouble, and in the large Russian minority (25%) inside Kazakhstan, who are largely resented by the locals and who could well become targets of "ethnic cleansing" by the country's crazed Islamist fanatics and/or resentful nationalists. He writes:

What is "hybrid war"? From the Russian perspective, it is a two-pronged approach to regime change. First, Western-backed NGOs encourage large protests against an incumbent government. Second, armed provocateurs use the protests as cover to stage kinetic attacks.

The Baidan connection to Kazakhstan—not just Ukraine and China—has long been known to those who followed the crime family that now occupies the White House. Among the Baidan connections in Kazakhstan was the the head of the intel services—now the former head:

Among the boldest and eye-brow raising political moves by embattled Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev within the past days that grabbed international headlines was his ordering the arrest of Kazakhstan's powerful former intelligence chief, Karim Massimov, on the charge of high treason.

Eyebrow raising? I’d say so. A direct Baidan connection, head of the intel services, charged with high treason for leading an attempted—and apparently failed—coup? People want to know whether he did that at the behest of Zhou. Certainly the Russians will say so—and why not, given the aggressive US moves and rhetoric of the past months?

What's more, a NGO-type group called KIAR, which says it's a corruption fighting group in Kazakhstan, (and could be a Russian front, too) says this:

Hunter Biden, a board member of the Ukrainian oil and gas company Burisma, became the epicenter of a huge political scandal in Washington. He received hundreds of thousands of dollars of salary at this company, while his father was the vice president of the United States and was personally responsible for the policy towards Ukraine. Currently, in the US Congress, these circumstances have led to numerous hearings. 

But no one knows that H. Biden received payments from KazMunaiGas, since he was a member of the management of the Kazakh company Burisma Kazakhstan. 

It was created jointly by the Kazakh state concern and a private Ukrainian company. 

Now the Burisma Group corporate website is unavailable, but we know that it was Karim Massimov, being the Prime Minister of Kazakhstan, who received the leaders of Burisma in Astana and instructed KazMunaiGaz to create a joint venture with it. What for? Is it not so that you can legally pay American politicians? This is the money that Kazakh oil workers and their families did not receive …