The State Department published the document on Monday as a media note under the title “C5+1: Historic Partnership, Prosperous Future”, with one line of its own: “The text of the following statement was released by the Governments of the United States of America, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan on the occasion of the C5+1 Ministerial in Samarkand.” The ministers write in the first person plural and open with the format’s age: “More than ten years ago, the first C5+1 Ministerial took place.”
Six headings follow, each beginning “We envision”: partners of choice, connections, a Central Asia central to the global economy, cooperation that energises the future, a secure future and a future that honours the past. Nothing in the text is counted: no trade figure, no investment sum, no date for the next meeting, and the words Russia, sanctions, Afghanistan and China do not appear. The Middle Corridor appears under Washington’s name for it, the Trans-Caspian Trade Route, and minerals under a sentence that reads “Data is gold; as such, we intend to exchange expertise and best practices on managing geological data.”
Security takes one of the six headings, with terrorism, organised crime, border security, illegal immigration and cyber threats, and nuclear security gets a paragraph of its own built on the Central Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone. Turkmenistan’s cabinet had been told on Saturday 17 October to expect a joint declaration of the foreign ministers and the secretary of state, by the state portal’s readout of that sitting. The document that came out is titled a statement, and its last line is “We envision C5+1 cooperation that continues to deliver regional solutions to global challenges.”
Bakhtiyor Saidov opened the session at the Congress Center with a reminder that the first ministerial met in the same city in 2015 and with a handover. “I would like to express our sincere appreciation to Turkmenistan for its productive co-chairmanship of the C5+1 Secretariat in 2025-2026,” he said in the State Department’s transcript. “As Uzbekistan assumes the co-chairmanship, we intend to build on these achievements,” and among the key priorities he named was “a strategic partnership in critical minerals from geological exploration and mineral processing to the establishment of local industrial clusters.”
Turkmenistan’s cabinet had been told on Saturday 17 October to expect a joint declaration of the foreign ministers and the secretary of state, by the state portal’s readout of that sitting.
Marco Rubio answered with last year’s figure and this year’s list. The November 2025 summit at the White House, he said, “yielded $25 billion in new deals,” and for this week he named the route, the minerals dialogue, “thousands of young professionals” to be trained on American technology and the B5+1, the format’s business forum. Saidov then asked the press to leave the room.
The figures arrived in the evening, at the second meeting of the Uzbekistan-United States Business and Investment Council, which Shavkat Mirziyoyev opened. “A package of 54 agreements and promising initiatives worth approximately 12 billion U.S. dollars has been put together,” he said through an interpreter, after 45 ministries and agencies had worked on it, and he proposed a joint programme to 2035. The investment ministry’s Telegram account, as the Tashkent business site Spot relayed it overnight, says the 54 agreements were signed, while the presidential press service, in Spot’s other report, says the package was prepared for the meeting.
Rubio told the council that “over 200 business leaders” had come from the United States, that Uzbekistan and other countries of the region would attend the G20 in Miami as observers in December and that AKFA Group would invest $80 million in Bowling Green, Kentucky, which he called the first Uzbek manufacturing operation in the United States. Saida Mirziyoyeva, the council’s co-chair, counted differently: almost 200 American companies in Tashkent in June, “another hundred U.S. companies came with the Secretary.” Her two figures add up to the almost 300 companies Rubio named at his Registan briefing on Monday morning, and the State Department’s more than 200 counts executives, who come in several from one company.
The bilateral readouts are shorter than the speeches. Rubio witnessed Saidov sign the Artemis Accords, which made Uzbekistan the 77th signatory, and welcomed its interest in American civil nuclear technology.
With Kazakhstan’s foreign minister Mukhtar Tileuberdi, who returned to the post in September, he discussed the G20 and, by the Kazakh foreign ministry’s readout as the Almaty business site Kapital carried it, confirmed his interest in a full-format visit to Kazakhstan soon after the summit, which Tokayev plans to attend at Trump’s invitation. Tajikistan’s Sirojiddin Muhriddin discussed trade, investment and security, with no document reported by Asia-Plus, and Turkmenistan’s cabinet had set the next date itself: political consultations with the United States in Ashgabat on 3 November.
The duties are the ones the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 wrote into law on 18 September: 500% on goods from Russia, 100% on the five largest buyers of Russian crude and gas, 100% on five facilitators of evasion. The order Trump signed on Friday 16 October set those rates and waived them in the same text, and the region’s exposure runs through gas, where CAW’s count of 14 October put Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan fourth and fifth among Russia’s buyers, and through Kazakhstan itself, which experts quoted by Reuters on Sunday named beside India among the countries the duties could have reached.
Trump spoke the same day as the ministers, leaving the White House for Kansas, and defended the waiver, The Washington Sun, a Washington daily of the Allbritton Journalism Institute, reported. “And of course, we’re negotiating with him on Ukraine. I’m not looking to break up negotiations right in the middle,” he said of Putin. “And by the way, I have the right to do that at any time, immediately. So if things don’t work out, I can always do it.”
He listed the subjects of the negotiation as Ukraine, hostages, diesel, where Russian exports to world markets reopened under an American licence on 9 October, and Iran, by the same account, and said Russia had been “fine on Ukraine” because “they haven’t been doing much.” On Ukraine’s president he said it was “time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine.” The Federal Register still had no trace of the order by 09:20 Moscow time on Tuesday, one working day after the Friday signing: its newest listed executive order dates from September, a search for the act’s full title returns nothing, and the public inspection desk shows no presidential document.
No government in the region had commented on the waiver by 09:40 Moscow time on the news sites of the six capitals, from Kazinform and Kapital to Spot, 24.kg, Asia-Plus, the Turkmen state portal and the Mongolian site ikon.mn. The oil the act is about has been repricing all week: Brent’s December future stood at $109.92 at 09:43 Baku time on Tuesday, by the Baku agency Report’s print, against $125.98 in the same agency’s print of Thursday, the day before the order, and Urals at Primorsk averaged $107.5 a barrel in October against the $59 a barrel on which Russia’s 2026 budget rule is built, Interfax reported on Monday evening.
The secretary flies on to Mumbai and Jamnagar, where India’s purchases of Russian crude are the act’s largest case after China’s, and the trip ends on Thursday 22 October.