The council prepares the ground for the leaders’ summit and clears the documents that go to it, which makes the agenda worth reading for what the organisation intends to say collectively. Four of the five Central Asian states are members, alongside China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran and Belarus; Mongolia sits among the partner states.
Two things are worth watching in the readouts. Whether the Black Sea attacks on Kazakh cargo appear in any collective language, given that a member state’s export artery has been shut for four days and the organisation’s standing vocabulary covers exactly this ground: security of transport corridors and critical infrastructure. And what Bishkek, chairing at home, chooses to put in front of the ministers while it buys fuel from China and Belarus and runs an indefinite export ban of its own.