A Russian-led military bloc will begin withdrawing its troops from Kazakhstan in two days' time after fulfilling its main mission of stabilising the Central Asian country after serious unrest, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said on Tuesday.
Tokayev told parliament he was appointing a long-serving career public servant Alikhan Smailov as prime minister and spoke of initiatives to narrow the wealth gap, raise taxes on the mining sector, and eliminate irregularities in state procurement.
Tokayev, 68, last week asked the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) to send in troops at the peak of what he later said was an attempted coup d'etat whose unnamed instigators had plunged half of the oil-rich nation's territory into violence.
A day earlier, he said that the CSTO mission, whose legitimacy and duration were queried by Washington prompting an angry response from Moscow, numbered 2,030 troops and 250 pieces of military hardware.
"The main mission of the CSTO peacekeeping forces has been successfully completed," Tokayev told parliament in a video conference call.
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