Kazakhstan jails citizen for six years for fighting for Russia against Ukraine

A court in northern Kazakhstan has sentenced 25-year-old Evgeniy Luft to six years in prison for participating in armed combat against Ukraine's forces on behalf of Russia, Kazakh news agency KazTAG originally reported on 25 February.

The conviction comes as Astana cracks down hard on citizens who join Russia's war machine. Kazakhstan opened over 700 criminal cases in 2025 alone against citizens who fought for Moscow—a dramatic escalation from the handful of prosecutions in previous years, according to Mediazona. A former Russian satellite state is now jailing its own citizens for serving in Moscow's army.

He claimed Russian citizenship. The paperwork said otherwise

According to the Kyzylzhar District Court verdict of 17 February 2026, Luft left Petropavlovsk—a city just 40 kilometers from the Russian border—for Russia in February 2025. There, he signed a one-year contract with Russia's Ministry of Defense and was deployed to a combat zone. From February to April 2025, he participated in operations against the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

The contract was supposed to last a year. It lasted two months. In April, Luft sustained a mine blast injury and was hospitalized. After treatment, rather than returning to his unit, he abandoned his position without permission and crossed back into Kazakhstan—where security services were waiting.

In court, Luft pleaded not guilty, insisting he considered himself a citizen of the Russian Federation. But the timeline collapsed his defense: according to the verdict, he only received Russian citizenship on 27 June 2025—months after he had already fought, been wounded, and fled. When he crossed into Russia and signed that contract, he was a Kazakh national under Kazakh law. The verdict has not yet entered into legal force.

Astana's quiet break from Moscow

The prosecution fits a pattern of Kazakhstan steadily distancing itself from Russia since the full-scale invasion began. In December 2025, Kazakhstan imposed strict export controls on dual-use goods and launched a $1 billion NATO-standard ammunition plant, which Russia's State Duma openly called "unfriendly." A month earlier, over 5,000 trucks sat frozen at Kazakh border crossings as Astana enforced secondary sanctions. By summer, Kazakhstan had already restricted exports of nitrocellulose, a key ingredient in Russian ammunition.

The shadow over northern Kazakhstan

Luft's case originates in Petropavlovsk, a city where ethnic Russians still outnumber Kazakhs, making up roughly 59% of the population. Russian nationalists have long called the region "South Siberia" and periodically claimed it as Russian territory. Putin himself suggested in 2014 that "Kazakhs never had a state of their own." Russian Duma deputies have demanded the "return" of northern lands. Yet separatist movements remain marginal and effectively suppressed by Kazakh authorities, who moved their capital north to Astana partly to tighten control over these border communities.