Russians Upstage U.S. in Central Asian Power Politics

From the Wall Street Journal, "Russians Outfox U.S. in Latest Great Game":

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan -- One at a time the government's top critics seemed to go to jail, or simply disappear.

Syrgak Abdyldayev, a local journalist, began to investigate whether the attacks had anything to do with a team of Russian-speaking specialists who arrived last year to advise the Kyrgyz government. He published several scathing articles accusing the government of shunting aside its opponents and turning to Moscow for financial support, including one in February that likened Russian aid to "oxygen for a sinking submarine."

Then Mr. Abdyldayev became a victim. Three men attacked him with metal pipes as he left his newspaper one evening in March, broke both his arms, his ribs and a leg, and stabbed him 26 times in the buttocks.

Times are changing in Kyrgyzstan, a mountainous Central Asian republic that not long ago was a hoped-for springboard for Western-style democracy in the former Soviet Union.

The president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, has steered Kyrgyzstan sharply back into the orbit of Moscow. In January, Mr. Bakiyev jolted Washington by announcing he was evicting the U.S. from an air base that has been crucial to the supply of troops fighting in Afghanistan. And political freedom here, as in Russia, is in decline. The Kyrgyz and Russian governments deny any link to the attacks on Kyrgyz critics.

In the West, hopes were high that the global financial crisis would rein in Vladimir Putin's assertive foreign policy. But here, as in other parts of the former Soviet Union, hard times have had the opposite effect: The Russians are coming back.

Russia has been hit by the crisis, but remains far richer than its former satellites, and it has used its largess to regain clout near its borders, in what President Dmitry Medvedev calls the "zone of privileged interests."

Read the whole thing, here.

I wonder if neoconservatives are vindicated by this turn of events? See Robert Kagan, "End of Dreams, Return of History: International rivalry and American Leadership."