BELGRADE, January 6. /TASS/. Foreign intelligence services are behind the ongoing mass riots in Kazakhstan, which will result in hundreds or thousands of deaths and a looted country for years to come, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic told reporters on Thursday.

In a comment on the Serbian oligarchs’ claims about their upcoming victory in the April 3 presidential election, Vucic said: "I don’t think that they (oligarchs - TASS) hope to defeat a candidate, who calls for Serbia’s prosperity, they are not that silly and uninformed, they know that our people appreciate the achieved progress and know what people think. They say this because they think that someone with big money will push them in Serbia to stage riots in the country. So that they stage something what is happening in Kazakhstan, where will be hundreds or thousands of deaths, a looted country for years to come, where foreign services of various major forces have interfered. Probably, they want the same thing to happen in Serbia," Vucic said.

Protests flared up in several cities of Kazakhstan on January 2. Later they erupted in other cities, including in Almaty, and on January 5 snowballed into mass riots and violence, along with looting and attacks on state buildings. As a result, more than 1,000 people were hurt and deaths have been reported.

Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has requested assistance of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a post-Soviet security bloc. The first units of peacekeepers have started fulfilling their assigned tasks in Kazakhstan.