On Monday, March 10 a telephone in Astana rang. Three times.

Once for Vladimir Putin.

Once for Angela Merkel.

Once for Barack Obama.

While telephone diplomacy between Russian President Vladimir Putin and American President Barack Obama seems to have yielded no results, a second channel seems to have opened through Kazakhstan. On March 10th Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev spoke to Putin and Obama, as well as with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

According to an official statement released after Nazarbayev’s call with Putin, Kazakhstan “treats Russia’s position, protecting the rights of national minorities in Ukraine, and also the interests of its security, with understanding.”

This endorsement of Putin’s invasion of Crimea serves half of Nazarbayev’s interest in the Ukraine affair. Although the invasion of Crimea sets an “uncomfortable precedent” for other post-Soviet republics with large Russian populations, such as Kazakhstan, the power and success of the crowds in Kyiv are a similarly uncomfortable precedent.

The case of neighboring Kyrgyzstan illuminates Nazabaryev’s wariness to support crowd-sourced regime change. The Tulip Revolution carried off Kyrgyzstan’s first president, Askar Akayev, and brought Kurmanbek Bakiyev to power in 2005. The Second Kyrgyz Revolution ushered Bakiyev out in 2010. Nazarbayev, like his counterparts in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, fears the latent power of angry crowds.

Nazarbayev also highlighted in his conversation with Putin the need to preserve the sovereignty of Ukraine and urged all sides to show “restraint.” This points to the Kazakh leader’s second interest in the Ukraine affair, keeping Russia safely across the border.

As Joanna Lillis, of Eurasianet noted,

Nazarbayev’s remarks could be taken as carte blanche for Russia to intervene on behalf of Russian speakers across the former Soviet Union—including in Kazakhstan, where the ethnic Russian minority constitutes 22 percent of the population.

In his second call, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Nazarbayev went so far as to mention Ukraine’s territorial integrity, confirming “ the importance of a diplomatic settlement to the Ukrainian crisis through dialogue between all interested sides, the use of possible mechanisms of international mediation to assure the territorial integrity of this country [Ukraine]…”

And in the third call, with American President Barack Obama, Kazakhstan was positioned as the avenue through which the West could deal with Russia on Ukraine. According to the White House readout of the conversation, the US president “encouraged Kazakhstan to play an active role in finding a peaceful outcome for Ukraine.”

Central Asia exists in a near-permanent state of cognitive dissonance.

The crisis in Ukraine stresses just how narrow a road Central Asian rulers walk between the pressures of Russia and the dormant potential of their own people. Nazarbayev wishes to see Ukraine’s territorial integrity respected while simultaneously desiring Ukrainian’s protesters to fail in their effort to overthrow the Yanukovych regime.

Though Yanukovych’s time has passed, Nazarbayev, and other Central Asia rulers, see in his fate their own potential downfalls. As threatening as a “carte blanche” for Russia may be, the firestorm of popular revolution is perhaps more terrifying.

While direct telephone diplomacy between Putin and West seems to have failed, the circuitous route of modern diplomacy through Central Asia may serve to calm tensions in Ukraine from spilling over and put off the ever-feared spread of revolutionary fervor to Central Asia.