Central Asian countries have options to get off of the conveyor belt that is being set up to suck them into Russia's orbit:
China sees an opportunity here. That’s because the former Soviet stans of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) have another option; China. The stans have been very receptive to Chinese diplomatic and economic cooperation. This bothers Russia, but not to the extent that threats are being made, as was the case with the former imperial provinces to the west. The stans also have a problem with never having been democracies. When the Russians conquered them in the 19th century the local governments were monarchies or tribes. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, locals who were former Soviet officials held elections and manipulated the vote to get themselves elected "president for life." But many people in the Stans want clean government and democracy, as well as continued independence from Russia. China is no help with that because the Chinese prefer dictators. But China does offer more economic opportunities and protection from what happened to Ukraine and Georgia.
Yes, having lots of ethnic Russians is danger in the Age of Putin. These states might find China a better-placed counterweight to Putin's great power ambitions rather than just patiently wait for Russia to get around to discovering the distress of their own ethnic Russians.
And China can pocket the precedent of rescuing your ethnic brethren if China ever sees an opportunity to revive dormant claims to Russia's Far East.
So Russia may pay a price even if we can't manage to exact one.
Which is just one reason that I never bought the idea that we alienated Russia by not considering them for NATO membership. In what world should NATO's security guarantees have been extended to the Amur river to hold off China?
