Kazakhstan is not at war with anyone. But its oil exports have been shut down by drone strikes it blames on Ukraine, aimed at infrastructure inside Russia. So the government in Astana is left pleading for the war next door to stop, or at least to freeze.
On Saturday, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev sat next to Vladimir Putin in the Siberian city of Omsk and said what Kazakh leaders rarely say out loud. “If I may offer my humble opinion,” he told reporters, “perhaps it is time to freeze this conflict and return to the Istanbul formula 2.0.” He was referring to the abandoned 2022 peace talks that nearly ended the war before it became a war of attrition.
The timing was not accidental. Days earlier, Kazakhstan announced it had slashed oil production after drone attacks forced the shutdown of its main export terminal on the Black Sea. The terminal is at Novorossiysk, a Russian port that has become a target of Ukraine’s campaign against Moscow’s “shadow fleet” of oil tankers. Ukrainian drones have hit nearly 200 shadow-fleet vessels in recent weeks.
Kazakhstan’s crude, known as the CPC brand, flows through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, a 1,500-kilometer pipeline owned by Western majors including Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell. About 80 percent of Kazakhstan’s oil exports go through this single pipe. The EU is the second-largest buyer, with Romania alone taking more than 60 percent of its crude from Kazakhstan.
The Foreign Ministry in Astana called the attacks an “unacceptable encroachment” designed to “destabilize legitimate international trade.” Ukraine’s ambassador to Kazakhstan, Viktor Mayko, responded by saying there was “no proof” the drones were Ukrainian.
Tokayev has walked a tight line throughout the war. After Russia’s 2022 invasion, he refused to recognize Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian territory. Now he praised Putin’s “diplomatic flexibility” and called Russia a “great power” that could guarantee peace. The shift reflects a simple reality: Kazakhstan cannot afford to alienate the country whose ports and pipelines carry its wealth to market.
But the war does not care about Kazakhstan’s balancing act. The pipeline was already threatened; the drone campaign just accelerated the damage. If the disruptions continue, more Kazakh oil will have to be rerouted through a higher-cost pipeline crossing the Caspian to Azerbaijan, a route that cannot match the CPC’s capacity.
The damage to Kazakhstan’s economy is already underway, even if its leaders are too diplomatic to call it what it is: collateral damage.