Mirziyoyev arrived on 8 July with roughly 230 Uzbek companies in tow, the largest business delegation he has brought on any foreign trip. The two presidents met informally the first evening, at Lukashenko's home, then held formal talks on 9 July at the Independence Palace. The centrepiece is a declaration establishing a strategic partnership, part of a package of about twenty documents covering machine building, agriculture, pharmaceuticals and light industry.
The numbers are real, if modest by regional standards. Bilateral trade reached about $855 million in 2025, up 35% year on year, with Belarus running a surplus above $500 million. The two sides now target $2 billion by 2030, doubling an earlier goal. Belarusian assembly lines in Uzbekistan already build 130-tonne BelAZ mining trucks and, Lukashenko said on 9 July, are ready to move to a 220-tonne model and roughly 3,000 tractors a year.
The line that matters came from the host, not the guest. Lukashenko told Mirziyoyev that beyond the joint projects, "with your help we could also enter third countries, especially those close to Uzbekistan." Belarus builds machinery and processes agricultural goods the world will not buy from it directly under sanctions in place since 2020. Uzbekistan, expanding trade with Afghanistan, the Gulf and now Georgia, is exactly the kind of neighbour that can move goods onward without a Belarusian label attached.
Tashkent's balancing act just got harder to read cleanly. In the same fortnight it signed a strategic partnership with Georgia aimed at European and Black Sea markets, hosted an IMF delegation, and pressed on with a WTO accession bid, it is now Europe's most sanctioned strongman's newest strategic partner, arriving in Minsk with the biggest trade delegation Mirziyoyev has assembled anywhere. Uzbekistan's multi-vector foreign policy has always meant courting Moscow, Beijing, Brussels and Washington at once. Belarus tests a different edge of it: not a great power to balance, but a sanctioned state asking to be quietly plugged into someone else's open door.
Belarus tests a different edge of Uzbekistan's multi-vector policy: not a great power to balance, but a sanctioned state asking to be quietly plugged into someone else's open door.
Nothing here breaks a rule. Uzbekistan is not itself sanctioned, and legitimate trade with Belarus is not evasion. But a strategic partnership signed the same week Lukashenko names third-country access as a goal, out loud, is a statement of intent that outlasts the visit.
Watch what is actually in the twenty documents once they are published, whether any of the new joint manufacturing lines are positioned for export beyond Uzbekistan, and whether Tashkent's Western partners, mid-WTO accession, say anything about the timing.