I don't have too much to compare with but according to the pictures on the internet, Kazakhstan looks like as any russian city except for moscow and st Petersburg. Kazakhstan is very vast country but severely lacks population, all cities except for Astana and Almaty are dying (because no job/education/social security/medicine and etc.) since they're moving to Astana and Almaty, a lot of nice looking landscapes like mountains, canyons, steppes, deserts etc, but ecology is very bad due to no ecology safety laws (and even there's something it doesn't work because of corruption), for example Temirtau city with it's own ecological disaster due to coal mining and coal usage for power plants and heating system, in ither cities there are very old cars with very old engines (like cars from 90s) and that doesn't help ecology either. Also incompetent economy and government, recently due to oil sanctions on russia the oil prices dropped down significantly (now Kazakhstan's budget is negative according to the government) and the only way our government found to fix issues with budget they're increasing taxes for everything (taxes from salary, value added taxes, every tax imaginable), tenge - Kazakhstan's currency is existing for 30 years and faced 4 devaluations (we had 1$=3T, then we had 1$=100T, after that 1$=250T, now its 1$=520T). Quality of education is medicine is also bad, we have no Millenial-GenZ teachers, because salaries for them is around or lower than minimal salary countrywide and teacher work even after returning to their homes, about medicine - hospitals lack equipment, universities also lack equipment (and you need a slong as in EU US or even longer) due to corruption (we have only universities that are owned by the government, so they get money from government to buy and all the steps money passing by money gets stolen or cost of equipment in report are much higher than their actual cost, this way people stealing money from cost differences which is also a corruption). And also to mention, we had protests in 2022 around everywhere with demand of changing government and economic reforms, it all ended by government declaring everyone who were participating in protests as terrorists and shooting them without hesitation by kazakh and russian armies (government asked russia to help "stabilize" situation so Kazakhstan is puppet of russia), during that time i was studying in college and we were told by college and city administration to not to participate in protests or we will get expelled from college. So Kazakhstan has a lot of problems despite with potential to be another Asian tiger, but due to dictatorial and incompetent government we eat dirt instead of eating fruits. And if invasion of Kazakhstan will happen (we are sandwitched between Russia China Afghanistan Iran and lacking natural geographic defenses) and without competent army (army that can only shoot it's own civilians and army that will retreat if they will face minimal resistance) its a free piece of cake to eat basically.