In a sign of Central Asia’s accelerating drift from the Kremlin’s political dictates, Kazakhstan will not recognize the referendums on joining Russia that Moscow has imposed on four regions of Ukraine. The referendums, which wrap up Tuesday, are taking place in embattled regions of Ukraine that are under various levels of Russian control, all illegal. 

They include the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic and the regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Kazakhstan’s very public critique will undercut Vladimir Putin’s goals of building legitimacy for the eventual annexation of these Ukrainian territories.

The referendums have already been widely derided as sham votes by the West, but Kazakhstan appears to be the first country in Central Asia to back that characterization. In a press statement, the Kazakh foreign ministry spokesman, Aibek Smadiyarov, said, “As for the self-proclaimed states of the LPR and DPR, and the military administrations of the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions of referendums on joining Russia, Kazakhstan proceeds from the principles of the territorial integrity of states, their sovereign equality and peaceful coexistence.”

In what could be read as a quiet appeal for diplomacy, Mr. Smadiyarov also said that Kazakhstan reaffirms “our readiness to render all possible assistance to the establishment of a political dialogue,” adding that “our country considers the preservation of stability, both at the regional and global levels, to be the most important task.”

Indeed, this is not the first time that mineral-rich Kazakhstan, arguably the most strategic nation in Central Asia and one that shares a 4,750-mile border with Russia, has distanced itself from the Russian strongman’s regional machinations. Last June the Kazakh president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, publicly rejected Russian calls to recognize eastern Ukraine’s pro-Moscow separatist regions. Mr. Tokayev did so while sharing a stage with the Russian president at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum. At the same meeting, Mr. Putin said that people who do not tie their fate to Russia should be “ashamed.”

It was not immediately clear whether the Kremlin had issued a response to the new Kazakh statements, but Russia’s hands are presumably full with managing the chaos caused by widespread backlash to last week’s announcement of a large if putatively partial new mobilization of conscripts. 

Friction between Moscow and Astana — as the Kazakh capital was recently renamed — has been building. In June, as the Sun previously reported, Russia’s prosecutor general, Igor Krasnov, said, “I am regularly informed that with the support of Ukrainian non-governmental organizations, active Russophobic activity is also unfolding in Kazakhstan.”

The claim was likely as spurious as the referendums now under way in occupied portions of Ukraine, but it points to simmering tensions between Russia and Kazakhstan, a former Soviet Socialist Republic where there is a sizable Russian-speaking community.  As far back as 2014 — the year that Moscow annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula — Mr. Putin told the Kazakh president at the time, Nursultan Nazarbayev, that he had “created a state on territory where no state had ever existed.”

As Ukrainians “vote” under duress in Mr. Putin’s brazenly phony referendums, the outcome is a foregone conclusion. How Kazakhstan and neighboring countries handle the new set of circumstances, and to what extent the verbal jousting will raise Moscow’s hackles, remains to be seen.