Serdar Berdimuhamedov opened the council in the narrow format at the Avaza complex with nine heads of state and government and the CIS secretary general at the table, and the enlarged sitting that followed added Masoud Pezeshkian, the first Iranian president at a CIS summit, invited as a special guest, by the Kremlin’s account and the host’s readout. The package signed at the end runs to 15 documents, by the list the Kremlin published, starting with the decision on the chairmanship in 2027, a protocol decision on the next council, the two statements and the decisions that declare 2028 the Year of Social Development and Quality of Life and 2029 the Year of Transport Connectivity.
Behind them come a decision on measures to form a positive image of the CIS in the information space, a decision on the 2030 round of population censuses, a protocol amending the 2018 agreement on crimes in information technology, a second optional protocol to the 1998 convention on the transfer of convicts, a concept of information exchange against crimes committed with information and communication technologies, a decision on information policy in the border sphere, an addition to the regulations of the prosecutors general’s council, a new chair of the air defence committee and a CIS diploma award. Turkmenistan’s foreign ministry names one of the fifteen in its readout, the 2029 decision, and calls the rest significant decisions.
The statement on the preservation of historical memory opens with its signatories: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Eight signatories are named in the statement on historical memory and Azerbaijan is not one of them. The text calls for an international association of historians and archivists of the CIS states to bring approaches, terminology and methodology closer, for the inadmissibility of the heroisation of nazism, fascism and other destructive ideologies, and for historical education built on an open, honest, professional and depoliticised dialogue.
The statement on the 35th anniversary is the longest text of the day. It binds trade to the strategy of economic development to 2030 and the free trade area in goods and services, calls for economic security against external shocks, backs the early entry into force of the UN convention against cybercrime, and declares that unauthorised satellite internet services on the signatories’ territories without a national licence violate international telecommunications law. It names the forced expulsion and extermination of civilians by the nazis and their accomplices a genocide of the peoples of the Soviet Union, welcomes the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s observer status at the CIS and the new CIS plus format for outside partners, and promises help in forming a new architecture of Eurasian security on the UN Charter.
Eight signatories are named in the statement on historical memory and Azerbaijan is not one of them.
Putin told the narrow format that Russia’s trade with its CIS partners passed $110 billion in 2025 and grew another 12 per cent in the first half of this year, that more than 90 per cent of commercial settlements between the states are in national currencies, and that the states themselves hold back the pace by keeping barriers they find convenient for a time, as he put it. He thanked Tajikistan and Turkmenistan for the two theme years, called the positive-image decision an urgent task, and invited everyone to St Petersburg on 21 December for the informal pre-New Year meeting.
The chair passes to Uzbekistan on 1 January, by Putin’s words and the first decision on the list, and Mirziyoyev invited the leaders to Bukhara for next year’s council. The motto of his chairmanship is the CIS as a space of trust and common development, the concept and action plan are being finished with more than 100 events already in them, and the priorities run from industrial cooperation to cybercrime, according to the Uzbek president’s office. Aliyev thanked the table for the decision on Azerbaijan’s co-chairmanship in 2027 and offered to chair in 2028 and host the council that autumn, which would be Azerbaijan’s first chairmanship, and Lukashenko called his colleague’s decision to take the chair in 2028 a historic moment and hoped Armenia would follow in 2029, as BelTA quoted him.
Mirziyoyev brought instructions. He asked the council to task the interior ministers with designing a joint CIS contact centre for cross-border cybercrime and fraud, and proposed a mechanism of advance notice and consultations before any member restricts exports of food or fertilisers, a single network of special economic zones and industrial parks, integrated logistics centres with unified freight rules, a long-term forecast of the region’s energy connectivity and a CIS concept of resource-efficient and circular economy, by the text his office published. Khiva hosts the CIS youth forum in the coming days.
Tokayev asked the executive committee and the governments to start drafting a CIS development strategy to 2035, since the concept in force dates from 2007 and was updated six years ago, and proposed a portfolio of flagship industrial and technological projects for 2027 to 2030, a forum of artificial intelligence specialists in Astana in the first quarter of 2027, the first summit of the CIS plus format and a golden library fund of the Commonwealth’s literature housed in the presidential library due in Astana next summer, by Akorda’s text. The CIS states take more than a quarter of Kazakhstan’s foreign trade, about $40 billion last year and 10 per cent more than a year earlier in the first seven months of this one, and Kazakhstan’s portfolio of industrial projects with Russian participation counts 178 projects and initiatives worth $61 billion, 124 of them completed, with 80 projects worth about $2 billion under way with Uzbekistan, he said. He also warned of an internet dictatorship that bred what he called a TikTok mentality among the young, and invited the CIS scholars to an Almaty conference in November on the 35 years of the Alma-Ata Declaration.
Pashinyan devoted his speech to that declaration. Peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan is an established fact, more than two years have passed without casualties from exchanges of fire, the Azerbaijani railway has been open to Armenian cargo for almost a year and a 12-kilometre section of the border is delimited and demarcated, he told the table by Armenpress’s text of the speech, with the TRIPP project on Armenian territory due in the near future and the opening of the border with Türkiye also anticipated. The peace is not perfect, he added, naming the missing, mine clearance and detainees, and he credited Putin with the ceasefire of November 2020 before telling the host that he had cycled around Avaza that morning and found it a paradise for a cyclist.
Aliyev counted transit through Azerbaijan at almost 8 million tonnes in the first half, 10 per cent more than a year earlier, with a medium-term target of 15 million tonnes in each direction on the East-West and North-South routes, by APA’s text of his speech. Rahmon recalled Tajikistan’s initiative to declare 2027 to 2036 an international decade of strengthening peace, with a high-level conference in Dushanbe in June 2027 to open it, by his press service, Japarov invited the leaders to the second global mountain summit in Bishkek in October 2027 and proposed CIS events for the Aitmatov centenary in 2028, by Open.kg, and Lukashenko told the room that unity comes from the economy and that a stronger economy would mean less talk about independence and the preservation of borders, as Interfax quoted him.
Pezeshkian used his first appearance to propose a format of the CIS countries plus Iran, a flexible mechanism for dialogue in energy, trade, mining, investment, technology, water and the environment, by RIA Novosti’s quotation of his speech. The ICT concept adopted on Friday provides for an interstate bank of digital traces of crimes and a plan of cooperation areas for 2025 to 2028, 24.kg reported from the text, and the census decision asks the states to agree in 2027 a common list of indicators so that the 2030 round can be compared across the Commonwealth, by BelTA.
The host’s readout counts the heads of government council, the 84th railway council, the foreign ministers and the culture council among the year’s sittings under Turkmenistan’s chair, and Bishkek hosts the next foreign ministers’ council in April 2027, Bukhara the next council of heads of state by Mirziyoyev’s invitation, and St Petersburg the informal one on 21 December. Baku’s agencies printed Aliyev’s speech and his offer of 2028 and nothing on the memory statement, the host’s readout names no signatories, and the Kremlin’s text names eight.