[Kazakhstan has significantly boosted its defence spending while seeking to strengthen ties with China and Nato nations]
The amusing thing about this, as John Derbyshire pointed out many years ago, is that after contentious discussions with China over territorial disputes decades ago, Nursultan Nazarbayev moved the nation’s capital from Almaty 800 road miles away to Astana (now Nursultan) - hundreds of miles away from both the Chinese and Russian borders. Frankly, if Ukraine retains its independence at the conclusion of this special military operation, its leader would be well-advised to move its capital far away from the Belarusian and Russian borders, much as Bonn, a small town in Germany, served as the West German capital for decades, and remains a united Germany’s second capital. A dictatorship needs to keep its capital near its biggest troop concentrations, as coup insurance. A democracy doesn’t.