President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev—who just a week ago was considered a weak shadow of Kazakhstan's now-ousted Security Council Chairman Narsultan Nazarbayev—admitted he was the one who had given local security forces the order "to shoot to kill" protestors without warning on Thursday. Never before has any post-Soviet leader confessed to such a terrifying order.

A day prior to Thursday's bloodshed, Tokayev had claimed he was fighting against "international terrorist gangs," referring to the Kazakh demonstrators who had taken to the streets this week to protest social and economic turmoil in the country. The president said that local security forces had failed control the situation, and admitted he had asked the the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO)—a Russian-led military alliance with a "peacekeeping force" of 3,600 troops—to help quell the unrest, which is looking more and more like it could spiral into a civil war. The CSTO obliged, with Russian troops arriving on Thursday.

"Tokayev needed CSTO as club to demonstrate to his commanders that, 'See, Moscow backs me up, there is a Russian soldier that stands next to you shoulder to shoulder,'" pro-Kremlin political expert Sergei Markov told The Daily Beast on Thursday, as Russian special units were boarding military jets enroute to Almaty. "This is the first time CSTO forces get deployed to a foreign state, and it's a message to Washington: Vladimir Putin has his own effective NATO capable of fulfilling military tasks."