President of Kazakhstan gave a speech:
https://thesaker.is/sitrep-kazakhstan-president-tokayev-addressed-the-nation/"An anti-terrorist operation is underway in our country. The police, National Guard and army are all carrying out an extensive and coordinated work to establish law and order in accordance with the Constitution.
Yesterday, the situation in the cities of Almaty, Aktobe and the Almaty region stabilized. The introduction of the state of emergency regime is yielding results. Constitutional legality is being restored throughout the country.
But terrorists still damage state and private property and use weapons against citizens.
I have given orders to law enforcement agencies and the army to shoot to kill without warning.
There have been calls from abroad for the sides to negotiate for peaceful solutions. What nonsense! How can you negotiate with criminals and murderers?
We had to deal with armed and trained bandits, both local and foreign. It is with bandits and terrorists. So they have to be eliminated. And this will be done in the near future."
So as I speculated earlier, the protest movement was quickly taken over and co-opted by a combination of local and foreign-trained terrorist groups. These terrorist groups immediately took up arms and started killing security and military personnel without warning, turning a "peaceful protest about gas prices" into a civil war/coup scenario.
This can only be pulled off with direct outside assistance.
Because of the armed provocations from the militants, Kazakhstan has more than enough justification to launch a military crackdown. These terrorist cells will be wiped out and then the attempted coup will fail, as it almost always does.
And that's basically that.