Public discourse increasingly casts Central Asia as shedding Russian influence – through decolonisation, a pivot to China, or a push for greater sovereignty – but the reality on the ground is far messier, Riddle Russia's Dan Storyev argues in a commentary that sets out the decoupling case only to spend most of its length dismantling it.

“In Astana, for instance, the arrival of senior Russian officials continues to be accompanied by ceremonial flyovers of Kazakh jets spraying Russian tricolour in the sky,” Storyev writes, of a region where “such scenes suggest that Russian influence, far from receding, retains substantial structural weight.”

Storyev credits the decoupling narrative with real substance: Central Asian societies distanced themselves rhetorically from Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, with 2022-23 language patrols in Kazakhstan targeting businesses over insufficient Kazakh-language signage; China and the EU have become more attractive trade partners than an economically lagging Russia, with Beijing financing Astana's newly completed light rail line and a Kashgar-Andijan railway through Kyrgyzstan; and the five states have quietly strengthened cooperation among themselves, delineating the Tajik-Kyrgyz border and jointly evacuating nationals from Iran, leaving the region without an active border conflict for the first time since 1991.

But elite rhetoric has not translated into policy. Kazakhstan's Kassym-Jomart Tokayev addressed a Russian delegation in Kazakh and earned the online nickname “tiger” for it, while Tajikistan's Emomali Rahmon told a 2022 summit that “the same problems that were the main reason for the Soviet Union's collapse still persist in relations between the countries” – then immediately asked Putin for more Russian investment and Russian-language textbooks. Tokayev has separately authorised Central Asia's largest Russian Orthodox Church complex in Astana.

Russian dominance persists across every dimension that matters. Militarily, Russia retains the region's only permanent foreign bases and helped keep Rahmon in power since the 1990s civil war and the Kazakh government in place during the January 2022 unrest, while the Kremlin has separately locked in a Rosatom-built nuclear plant in Kazakhstan worth an estimated $14.4bn.

Economically, Kazakh oil and a large share of regional gas exports still transit Russian pipelines, over 10mn Central Asians work in Russia despite Kyrgyz migration to Russia roughly halving to 350,000 by end-2024 after the Crocus City Hall attack on March 22, and platforms from Ozon and Yandex to the Moldovan-run A7 sanctions-evasion payment network – routed through Kyrgyzstan as its main banking hub – remain structurally embedded.

Pro-Kremlin broadcasters Sputnik, RT and Channel One stay freely available, with a 2023 USAID survey finding 18-23% of audiences across Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan still relying on Russian television for news.

China, by contrast, has scaled back the riskiest of its regional bets, formally withdrawing from Kyrgyzstan's $275mn At-Bashi Logistics Hub after 2020 protests even as its partners reportedly stayed involved behind the scenes, and shifting toward smaller, “elegant” projects such as electric vehicles, which now make up most new car registrations in Tajikistan's Khujand.

Storyev's conclusion is blunt: with Washington and Europe offering little beyond trade arrangements, and Western democracy-promotion infrastructure weakened in the post-USAID period, the five capitals have settled into an authoritarian equilibrium that extracts benefits from Moscow's networks and security guarantees while paying lip service to sovereignty. “They remain firmly embedded within Russia's sphere of influence, with their elites appearing both aware of and advantaged by this position,” he writes.