Results of ongoing work. That is the phrase the Kyrgyz government chose in June to describe what Eldik Bank and ABank had just done: severed ties with 131 companies, and opened files on 80 more, all flagged for sanctions risk. Weeks earlier the Ministry of Justice had ordered 50 locally registered companies to shut down. A new title had appeared in the cabinet that spring, presidential special representative for sanctions policy, held by the economy minister. The work had results. Nobody in Bishkek used the word confession. They did not need to.
Rewind to 24 April, the day the European Union rolled out its twentieth sanctions package and pointed a new tool at Kyrgyzstan for the first time, ever, at any country: an anti-circumvention mechanism, aimed at machine tools and radio equipment that Brussels said were entering the country and leaving again for Russia, up by roughly eight hundred percent on one side of the border and close to a thousand percent on the other. President Sadyr Japarov called the pressure one-sided. On the day the package was adopted, he flew to Moscow.
Here is the parallel worth sitting with. A defendant stands up in open court and says he did nothing. He says it clearly, on the record, with feeling. Then, on his own time, through a side door, he returns what was taken, quietly, item by item, and hopes nobody adds the two scenes together. Bishkek gave the speech in April. It has spent the months since returning the goods.
Bishkek gave the speech in April. It has spent the months since returning the goods.
Watch the numbers do the talking that the officials won't. Six Kyrgyz banks now sit under EU sanctions, two of them added under that same package, their transaction ban taking effect on 14 May. The state company that a European investigation assigned a key role in a sanctions-evasion network sits, on paper, under the Ministry of Economy, the same ministry now employing a man whose full-time job is making the sanctions problem go away. The 131 dropped clients and the 50 shuttered firms are not an unrelated cleanup. They are the answer to a question Brussels had been asking in public since February, given at last in the one language Kyrgyzstan seems to trust: bank statements, not statements to camera.
Notice the job title itself, because Bishkek wrote the confession into its own org chart. The economy minister was handed a new portfolio this spring: special representative for sanctions policy. A government with nothing to hide does not need a full-time envoy for a problem it insists does not exist. The EU's own envoy, touring Bishkek in February, had already named what he was looking for: machine tools and radio equipment, he said, being imported "with the sole purpose of being re-exported to Russia." Six months later Kyrgyzstan has a minister whose job is to make sure nobody says that sentence about it again.
Compare the going rate for candour. Kazakhstan spent the same season closing $462 million in transport and connectivity deals in Brussels, with the European Commission crediting Astana's "significant progress and good cooperation" on preventing sanctions circumvention before listing the money. Tajikistan gave Brussels its assurances in the spring and had three banks delisted within six months. Kyrgyzstan, having quietly done more or less what both were asked to do, has so far collected two consolation prizes: its honey added to a European registry, and its airlines removed from an aviation blacklist. A country that spent two years denying everything is now being paid in honey for finally, silently, doing something about it.
None of this required an admission, and none came. That is the part worth remembering the next time Bishkek calls a foreign accusation one-sided. The denial was never really for Brussels. Brussels had the trade data. The denial was for the room back home, and the room back home was never told what the bank statements meant, until a columnist went looking.
Peter Lidovsky writes on Eurasia and the politics of the spaces between empires. He contributes a weekly column to Central Asia Wire. The views expressed are his own.