Fishy Ambassadors to the Cheesy Swiss

Official representatives of a country have been supposed to be somewhat hand-picked, decent envoys not to be ashamed of. Well, sometimes they don’t observe this golden rule of diplomacy. A convincing example of such deviation presents itself in the following story.

This old man, resembling a retired Sicilian Mafia chief, is Kudaibergen Sarzhanov — the former Kazakh minister of fishing industry. He points to a fishing boat, dutifully painted as a Russian tricolor, displayed at the Museum of Aral Fishermen. A nephew of Mr. Sarzhanov — a diplomatist Kairat Sarzhanov — is the current Ambassador of Kazakhstan to Switzerland since 2022. Information about his parents and birthplace has been discreetly suppressed. As a rule, diplomatists have been closely associated with espionage. Well, in Ambassador Sarzhanov’s case, this spy connection is quite evident, because he once was the Director of the International Security Department in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Kazakhstan — clearly, an intelligence community’s position.

Ambassador Sarzhanov’s pro-Russian stance have been emphasized once more by his diplomas of the Moscow State University and Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. He also held an important position of the Kazakh Ambassador to Brazil, Argentina, and Chile.  The diplomatist has been another representative of the Aral Sea region to be appointed as the Kazakh Ambassador to Switzerland. A pro-Russian billionaire Bulat Utemuratov held this much-coveted diplomatic position in 1996-1999. Mr. Utemuratov’s ancestors also hail from the Aral Sea region.

Moreover, another Kazakh billionaire Dinara Kulibayeva, who holds Swiss residency, might be a descendant of the Aral Sea folks. Her elder sister — a billionaire politician Dariga Nazarbayeva — is DEFINITELY a biological daughter of an Aral Sea drunkard singer Malkazhdar Izbassarov, whose full name and bio for the first time had been established in my Kazakh-language investigative report, which was later confirmed in Russian by the former Mayor of Almaty Viktor Khrapunov, who is also a Swiss resident. In a word, the vanishing Aral Sea has proved to be a hotbed of questionable diplomatists.

However, apart from the fishy Aral region representatives, other Kazakh envoys to Switzerland have been generally a far cry from perfect. For example, in 1996-2002 a pro-Russian Ingush billionaire Akhmed Mestoyev served as a trade commissioner of Kazakhstan in the Swiss Confederation, who afterwards in 2002-2010 and 2012-2017 was a trade commissioner of Kazakhstan in the Russian Federation. No wonder that nowadays the Kazakhs dutifully provide a loophole for the sanction-ridden Russia.

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