MOSCOW, January 19. /TASS/. Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov has described the transit of power from Kazakhstan’s first president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, to the current leader, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, as that country’s internal affair.

"This is an exclusively internal affair of Kazakhstan," Peskov said in reply to a corresponding question.

"It goes without saying that Mr. Tokayev is the current head of state. This is a fundamental reality. Everything else is Kazakhstan’s internal affair," he said.

Peskov said that Russian President Vladimir Putin shared a warm relationship with both Nazarbayev and Tokayev.

"You know that the [Russian] president has a very warm relationship with the current president [of Kazakhstan] and with the first president. Just recently, several weeks ago, they met in St. Petersburg," Peskov recalled.

Protests erupted in several Kazakh cities on January 2, escalating into mass riots with government buildings getting ransacked in several cities, in the first place, in Almaty, a few days later. The ensuing violence left scores of people injured, with fatalities also being reported. Subsequently, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev turned to the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) requesting assistance from the Russia-led bloc. As a result, peacekeepers were deployed to Kazakhstan. Law and order, Kazakh authorities affirm, have been restored to all of the country’s regions by now.

Nazarbayev, who turned 81 in July 2021, was Kazakhstan’s first president (1991-2019). In March 2019, he signed a decree he was stepping down as president of his own accord. Tokayev succeeded him as the head of state.