Russia has suspended the import of dairy products from Kyrgyzstan after the chairman of Kyrgyzstan’s National Commission for the State Language and Language Policies, Kanybek Osmonaliev, said his country is ready to start working on switching the Kyrgyz language from Cyrillic to a Latin-based alphabet.
Russia's agriculture products watchdog, Rosselkhoznadzor, said in a statement on April 21 that the move was made following the inspection of Kyrgyz dairy products and milk farms last week, which revealed an "inefficiency" in control by Kyrgyz dairy companies over product quality. No specific issues were mentioned.
Russia has for years used Rosselkhoznadzor as a blunt foreign policy instrument against former Soviet states whose actions Moscow dislikes. Russia has banned food and drinks from Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine during periods of increased bilateral tensions. Those countries have described Moscow’s actions as economic sanctions.
A day before the suspension was announced, Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov met with Osmonaliev and harshly criticized him for his April 19 statement about the necessity for the Kyrgyz language to switch from Cyrillic to a Latin-based alphabet, an issue that has irritated Moscow.
The move to shift to Latin script was in part driven by political considerations in order to distance the Turkic-speaking nations from years of Russian influence and develop a stronger national identity.
In Kazakhstan, the process of switching to the Latin alphabet has been going on since 2017, when former President Nursultan Nazarbaev first instructed the government to work on the transition of the Kazakh alphabet to a Latin-based variant by 2025.
In Uzbekistan, two alphabets, Latin- and Cyrillic-based, were used in parallel from 1993, but as of January 1, 2023, only the Latin variant has been used by official entities.
Another Central Asian nation, Turkmenistan, fully switched from the Cyrillic script to Latin in 1993, while Azerbaijan, a Turkic-speaking former Soviet republic in the South Caucasus, replaced its Cyrillic-based alphabet with the current Latin-based script on December 25, 1991, RFE/RL reports.
