MOSCOW, February 10. /TASS/. Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service knew that preparations were underway for the events in Kazakhstan that happened in early January, the agency’s Director Sergey Naryshkin said in an interview published by the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper on Thursday.
"Of course, we had," he said when asked if the intelligence service had information about preparations for the events in Kazakhstan. "It was mostly that militants from the IS (banned in Russia) groups that were destroyed in Syria, and some other terrorist groups, made their way to Central Asian countries."
"It wasn’t a secret to us and the special services of those countries," he went on to say.
"It was also known under whose supervision these movements took place," the official said. "All the countries of the region expressed concern about this. We shared this information with colleagues in Kazakhstan and other countries that are CSTO members."
According to Naryshkin, the events in Kazakhstan showed how destructive political forces can in a quick and coordinated way use peaceful protests with economic slogans to try to stage color revolutions. "These forces will not stop at using militants of all stripes," he said. "Control over them is done using the standard patterns for domestic political destabilization, which were on full display in Ukraine in 2014."
Protests erupted in several Kazakh cities in early January, with attacks on police and the military. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev described the events as an attempted coup. The situation was stabilized by January 7 while the emergency situation lasted in some regions until January 19. As a result of the events, 225 people were killed and more than 4,500 injured.