Kyrgyzstan’s local payments operator announced last week that it’ll stop accepting Russia’s Mir bank card on Friday, which coincided with reports that most Kazakh banks had already stopped servicing them and follows Armenia’s official decision to do the same last month. Unlike those two, the first of which has been pivoting towards the West while the second is voluntarily turning itself into a NATO proxy, there are no reasons to suspect that Kyrgyzstan has any unfriendly intentions.
It was explained last August why “Kyrgyzstan Is The US’ Next Regime Change Target”, which cited now-disgraced former Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Menendez’s letter to President Sadyr Japarov to argue that it conveys a thinly disguised intent to overthrow his government. The alleged pretext for advancing this goal is that Kyrgyzstan is violating the US’ unilateral sanctions alongside its supposed backsliding on democratic and human rights standards.
Two months ago in mid-February, “Kyrgyzstan Moved To Preemptively Discredit The US’ Latest Meddling Scheme” after President Japarov published his response to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s letter from the month prior in which the latter fearmongered about Kyrgyzstan’s FARA-like foreign agents bill. The Kyrgyz leader’s continued commitment to protecting his country’s hard-earned sovereignty that followed the past two decades’ worth of Color Revolution unrest provoked America’s regime change ire.
If President Japarov had any unfriendly intentions towards Russia, then he could have easily complied with Menendez and Blinken’s pressure after those two top policy influencers indirectly conveyed their country’s intent to overthrow his government if it didn’t distance itself from its strategic partner. It was unfortunate that Kyrgyzstan stopped accepting Russia’s Mir bank card under pain of crippling sanctions pressure, but it’s understandable that it can only resist the US politically and not financially.
Even so, President Japarov announced earlier in the month that he’ll visit the US from 14-20 April, during which time “I will try to explain the situation that we cannot fully stop our trade and economic relations with the Russian Federation, it is our strategic partner.” Truth be told, he’s unlikely to convince American policymakers to reconsider their latent regime change campaign against him, but it’s important that he’ll still try and also publicly reaffirmed Russia’s status as his strategic partner in the same statement.
Russia trusts President Japarov and his regional counterparts from neighboring Uzbekistan and nearby Turkmenistan so much that it decided last summer to pioneer the “Southern Transport Corridor” with them via the Caspian as a means of hedging against the possibility of Kazakhstan cutting off their trade. The decision to invest limited time and resources into this endeavor amidst the much more pressing needs of the special operation wouldn’t have been made if there wasn’t deep trust between them.
It’s for these reasons that well-intentioned members of the Alt-Media Community shouldn’t be too critical of Kyrgyzstan’s unfortunate but nevertheless understandable decision to stop accepting Russia’s Mir bank card. This tiny country can’t realistically resist the US on the financial front, but everything that it’s doing on the political one proves that it doesn’t have any unfriendly intentions towards Russia unlike what’s speculatively the case with Kazakhstan and indisputably the one with Armenia nowadays.
