Peaceful Russians lol
By 1848,. Russia had gained control of Kazakhstan. The ruling khans were stripped of their titles and Kazakhstan became a Russian colony. Almaty was established as a fort in southern Kazakhstan in 1854. By the 1860s, the Kazakh steppe was surrounded by Russian fortifications and military outposts. This helped to strengthen the Russian Empire by expanding its’s borders and creating buffer zones between it and its enemies.
Belarus was retaken by Stalin's Russia in 1944 and remained under Soviet control until declaring its sovereignty on July 27, 1990 and independence from the Soviet Union on August 25, 1991. It has been run by authoritarian PresidentAlexander Lukashenko since 1994.