How would this help with any kind of Russian insurgency, espionage, etc. at all? According to the article there is 20% of ethnic Russians and more fluent Russi

How would this help with any kind of Russian insurgency, espionage, etc. at all? According to the article there is 20% of ethnic Russians and more fluent Russian speakers (94%) than Kazakh speakers (74%). Russian is also a co-official language in Kazkhstan and I can't find anything about getting rid of that. Latin (and Cyrillic) alphabet is also no cipher. It's easy to learn one when you know the other, the shapes are similar, some letters are shared (some with same, some with different sounds), etc. The difference could be even said to be cosmetic at best, unlike Korean, Chinese or Arabic scripts that are completely different shapes and styles and hand moves when writing and so on. If you learn Russian in a Polish school as a second foreign language (second to German or English, as I did) it goes at a snail's pace of two or three lesson per week but Cyrillic is like a month or two of that at best. Any Russian who knows at all any of the big western languages (Spanish, French, German, English) or one of the right Slavic ones (the ones not using only Cyrillic in their writing) also already knows the Latin script. Moldova and Azerbaijan using Latin script didn't help with Transnistria and Artsakh at all. Georgian script[0] is also nothing like Cyrillic or Latin (I know them both but at Georgian I can only stare blankly) but that hasn't helped with Abkhazia or South Ossetia. If a Russian spy, insurgent or whatever wants to blend in, operate or whatever somewhere, he probably can do it easier in Kazakhstan than in those disputed regions. If anything, sidelining Russian artificially because "Latin = West = good = we want" is only giving Russia a really good excuse of caring about ethnic Russians (not that they needed any big one like that for Crimea where Cyrillic and Russian weren't sidelined at all). It's also bad from a practicality standpoint, forcing everyone to pick up Latin script suddenly (while before now the two main languages used the same one) and paying for replacing all the plaques and official books and documents and such. It won't help tourists either, if you don't know Kazakh then you just don't. I can read Cyrillic and can read some Russian very slowly by my crappy basic skills from school years and using Polish as a crutch but I can't read Kazakh at all. You can clutch your way between very many European languages (and the Cyrillic/Latin split in the Slavic group is the only major roadblock in a single group to doing this that I know of, as in - the script is the big problem, not the language itself) but looking at Kazakh is as good as looking at Turkish or Vietnamese or Malay or transcribed Chinese. You get maybe an occasional global-y word like hamburger, pizza, republic or computer at best. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_scripts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_scripts