I've been seeing some rumblings on twitter (yeah, yeah ik) that this reeks of CIA/Russia. It'd be great if it's a white hat op but it's just as likely a cold war flare up.

eurasianet, Kazakhstan explainer: Why did fuel prices spike, bringing protesters out onto the streets? To elaborate on the reasoning given for the protests "officially"-

It all began with the phased transition to electronic trading for LPG that began in January 2019 and concluded on the first day of this year. The idea was to gradually end the subsidizing of prices for domestic fuel consumers and to allow the market to dictate prices instead.... This policy has, predictably enough, led to a particularly precipitous rise in costs where demand for this fuel is high. And that has been the case in Kazakhstan’s western Mangystau region. In a matter of days, prices for LPG at gas stations doubled from 60 tenge ($0.14) to 120 tenge ($0.28) per liter.... Energy Minister Magzum Mirzagaliyev has gone so far as to accuse gas stations in the region of price-fixing. Their mark-up on LPG sales stands at 25-50 percent, which is “higher than expected” and “gives us grounds to suspect possible price speculation among filling stations,” he said. The anti-monopoly agency is investigating.

Sure enough, filling stations in Mangystau appeared to quickly respond to pressure from the government and reduced their prices for LPG to 85-90 tenge per liter as a way of mollifying the swelling number of protesters. And then, on January 4, after talks between a government commission dispatched from Nur-Sultan to appease the demonstrators and representatives of the protesters in Aktau, an oil city near Zhanaozen where thousands of protesters have also gathered, officials announced that the price of LPG in Mangystau would be slashed once more, to 50 tenge ($0.11) per liter. That is 16 percent lower than it was before the protests began.

So it seems that the government had already conceded, why then, are the protestors not pacified?

algemeiner, Is Kazakhstan Russia’s Next Ukraine?

“One can label calling ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan a Diaspora as a political mistake, for these are our lands which have been temporarily torn away from Russia,” said Pavel Shperov, a former ultra-nationalist member of the Russian parliament while he was still a deputy. “Borders are not eternal. We will return to the borders of the Russian state,” he added.

An informal poll in Ridder, a predominantly ethnic Russian coal-mining town on eastern Kazakhstan’s border with Russia, suggested several years ago that up to three-quarters of the city’s mostly ethnic Russian population favored becoming part of Russia.

Putin first sent a chill down Kazakh spines seven years ago, when a student in a news conference asked him nine months after the annexation of Crimea whether Kazakhstan risked a fate similar to that of Ukraine.

Echoing a widespread perception among ethnic Russians that Russia had civilized central Asia’s nomadic steppes, Putin noted that then-president Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s Soviet-era Communist party boss, had “performed a unique feat: he has created a state on a territory where there has never been a state. The Kazakhs never had a state of their own, and he created it.”

The former president, Nazarbayev, previously said at a celebration of Kazakh Independence Day that “independence was hard-won by many generations of our ancestors, who defended our sacred land with blood and sweat. Independence is the steadfast resolution of each citizen to defend Kazakhstan, their own home, and the motherland to the last drop of blood, as our heroic ancestors have bequeathed us.”

Some analysts suggest that the 81-year-old Nazarbayev may be the last barricade blocking a Russian-Kazakh confrontation.

msn, cbs, Rare protests draw resignations and shake Kazakhstan to the core

The protesters added political demands to their initial call for lower fuel prices. According to local media reports, protesters in Almaty chanted "old man out," in reference to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev's predecessor, Nursultan Nazarbayev.

Nazarbayev formally handed the reins of government to Tokayev in 2019, in a controlled departure from the highest office. But Nazarbayev, who assumed the honorary title of "Elbasy" ("Head of State") and remained the head of the Security Council, still had significant influence over Kazakhstan's politics.

On Wednesday, Nazarbayev resigned from his post as head of Security Council. Tokayev assumed that role, too, and issued a warning as he did so that his government was "prepared to act harshly" to quell the challenge from protesters.

In a televised address overnight, before Nazarbayev's resignation from the Council, Tokayev had promised that the demonstrators' "legal" demands would be met, but he added: "The government will not fall."