Zakon.kz and Tengrinews carried the decree from Akorda's Telegram channel at 15:02 Astana time: appointed minister of foreign affairs, relieved of his previous post. That post was ambassador to Austria and permanent representative to the international organisations in Vienna, held since August 2023.
That posting matters. Vienna is where the International Atomic Energy Agency sits, and Kazakhstan is the world's largest uranium producer with a first nuclear power station on its books. Vienna is also the seat of the OSCE, whose observers split with the CIS mission over last month's Kurultai vote.
Tleuberdi was born in 1968 in the Chimkent region. He joined the ministry in 1993, served in Seoul and Tel Aviv, ran the embassies in Kuala Lumpur and Bern, and was first deputy minister from 2016 before Tokayev made him minister in September 2019, 3 months after the June 2019 election. From January 2021 he held the ministry as a deputy prime minister, and he left both posts in April 2023.
Wednesday's decree is the only ministerial name on that clock so far.
Yermek Kosherbayev held the ministry for 11 months, from 26 September last year. The decree relieves Tleuberdi of his old post and says nothing of his predecessor; no new post for Kosherbayev had surfaced by the time this pack closed.
The appointment is the first of the cabinet round. Olzhas Bektenov was reappointed prime minister and Yerlan Karin made vice-president on Monday, after the Kurultai's vote, and the law on government gives 10 days from the prime minister's appointment for the cabinet to be formed, which puts the deadline at 10 September. Wednesday's decree is the only ministerial name on that clock so far.
The choice reads as continuity with a nuclear file attached. Tleuberdi's ministry ran the 2019 to 2023 stretch in which Kazakhstan kept its multi-vector language while the sanctions economy grew around it. The ambassador who spent 3 years accredited to the IAEA returns as foreign minister of the country that mines more uranium than any other and has hired Rosatom to build its first reactor.