Kazakhstan’s president appealed to a Russian-led military alliance for help on Wednesday after vowing to act with force to curb protests that have swept the resource-rich central Asian nation in the most significant challenge for years to autocratic rule.
Shortly afterwards, Armenia’s prime minister Nikol Pashinyan, who chairs the Collective Security Treaty Organization, blamed the crisis on “external meddling” and said the group would send a contingent of “peacekeepers” to Kazakhstan for a “limited period of time […] with the goal of stabilising and normalising the situation in the country”.
A state of emergency was declared nationwide after anger at rising fuel prices escalated into protests in several Kazakh cities, with significant buildings set alight and demonstrators overrunning an airport in the former capital Almaty.