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Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev believes he can be an independent intermediary between the parties in the Ukrainian crisis, Tengrinews reports with reference to STV broadcast.
"I believe that everybody’s goal is to stop this war, to strengthen the independence of Ukraine, to recognize the territorial integrity of Ukraine, to sit down at the negotiation table as the Russian leaders put it now,” Nazarbayev said on December 21 in an meeting with media representatives.
The President said he held a neutral position in the crisis, making him an “honest manager” for the parties involved.
“Kazakhstan regards Russia and Ukraine in the same manner, we have no conflict of interests, which makes me a sort of an “honest manager”, who isn’t biased towards either side, who is neutral and can therefore contribute," he said.
The President stressed that Kazakhstan would continue its multidirectional foreign policy. “There are states in this world which adhere to the policy of neutrality. There are those with multidirectional policies. There is nothing special about this, all states are multidirectional," he said.
"This means that being independent and self-governed, a country can communicate, trade, enter into political agreements with all the countries with which it is beneficial for it to trade and communicate. Our multi-vector policy has led to the fact that we have a very friendly environment with all the states, we have no conflicts that are unsolvable, we have delimitated all the borders," Nazarbayev said as cited by BNews.kz.
He also noted that in all of the agreements signed by Kazakhstan, including in the Eurasian Economic Union, it is spelled out that communication with third parties should not be in any way restrained.
Talking about the reasons for the current crisis in Ukraine, he said: “I see the roots in that Ukraine has not developed appropriate economic policies or ensured sustainable growth of the country specifically in the economic sense during the years of independence.”
Nazarbayev then pointed out that that he saw many similarities between Kazakhs and Ukrainians, including the mentality of the two nations. There are many Turkic words in the Ukrainian language and the Kazakhs and Ukrainians always lived adjacently, he noted.
“The question is: what ideas were those people killed for? The people were simply led to confrontation, to a fratricidal war. As a result, the eastern Ukraine with all of the country's industrial enterprises is in ruins. These are Donbas, Lugansk, the mines, metallurgical and machine-building plants. A significant part of the economy of Ukraine, which used to generatethe gross domestic product, has been knocked out of the orbit," Nazarbayev said.
By Dinara Urazova
