>saying Kazakhstan is independent... that's rich. The moment Kazakh government thinks about denouncing russian as official language, putin will send a new government

at the time of the empire's collapse, Putin was essentially a nobody. Yeltsin and the oligarchs didn't really give a fuck about Kazakhstan, Ukraine, the Baltics, and the rest. they were truly and unconditionally independent, and Russia, given its humiliating defeat in Chechnya, couldn't do shit about it even if it wanted to (which it didn't).