Exclusive - Kazakhstan balanced between Ukraine and post-NATO Afghanistan

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Looking at the neighbourhood around Kazakhstan on a spinning globe, the Central Asian nation's foreign minister sees both partnerships and peril in the form of the Russian-Ukraine crisis and the coming NATO pullout from Afghanistan by year end.

Foreign Minister Erlan Idrissov used the globe in the country's Mission to the United Nations on Monday to illustrate the geopolitical conditions it faces, with perhaps the biggest influence coming from Russia, its former Soviet overlord, to the north.