KAZAKHSTAN-RUSSIA SUMMIT SEEKS DEEPER COOPERATION
Presidents Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan and Dmitry Medvedev of Russia held a two-day summit in early September, at the two countries’ Seventh Forum on Interregional Cooperation in Oskemen (settled by order of Peter the Great in 1720, called Ust’-Kamenogorsk from the mid-nineteenth century until 1992), the capital of the East-Kazakhstan province. While some agreements to implement existing agreements for joint energy development of the Khvalynskoe and Imashevskoe deposits were reached, the summit was mainly notable for being less superficial than other such meetings in the recent past. BACKGROUND: There are two main areas of historical Russian concentration within the borders of contemporary Kazakhstan. First there is an historically settled area, shadowing the present-day border in the north, of industrial concentrations connected with natural resource exploitation and heavy industry. Second, the agricultural “virgin lands” of the Khrushchev era stretch much further south, almo...