Putin visits Turkmenistan on 8 and 9 October, takes part in the CIS Council of Heads of State and the Caspian summit, meets Serdar Berdimuhamedov one to one on the first day before the events begin and meets Masoud Pezeshkian after everything ends on Friday, Ushakov told journalists at a briefing Interfax carried at 19:08 and 19:59 Moscow time. The Kremlin has given the summit a date, and the host has given it three names. A meeting with Nikol Pashinyan is not planned, he said, though a contact in the course of the events cannot be ruled out, and informal talks with CIS leaders may take place on the sidelines, standing or seated, as the two summits proceed.
One acute problem is on the summit’s agenda, Ushakov said: the shallowing of the Caspian. The water level is cyclical, its swings reach several metres in a decade, and Russian specialists see the main factor in climate, which cuts the inflow and raises evaporation, in his words. A declaration dedicated to the sea’s ecological problems, shallowing included, is expected at the end, he said, and in the same answer he called it the declaration of a “Caspian political summit”.
The Kremlin has given the summit a date, and the host has given it three names.
Turkmenistan’s state portal gives the Caspian track three names on three pages. Its programme post, published on 9 May with a modification stamp renewed five times since 1 October, the last at 16:35 on Tuesday, and its programme lines unchanged between Tuesday morning’s reading and Wednesday’s, lists a meeting of the Caspian states’ ministers on 7 October “aimed at the sea’s current environmental tasks”, with no ministry named, the consultative meeting of Central Asia’s heads of state and Azerbaijan on 8 October and the CIS council on 9 October, and no meeting of Caspian leaders.
A post of 26 August on Tokayev’s telephone call with Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov names a “Caspian Ecological Summit” among three forums of 7 to 9 October in which Tokayev confirmed his personal participation. A third, the foreign ministry’s report of a Caspian Sea Day conference in Tehran on 11 August, says a meeting of heads of state on the sea’s ecological questions “is planned for 9 October 2026 in the Avaza national tourist zone”, and the portal re-stamped it at 03:45 and again at 10:42 on Wednesday by its own clock.
Lavrov takes part on Wednesday in the CIS Council of Foreign Ministers at Avaza, the centre on the Caspian shore near Turkmenbashi, Interfax reported at 02:45. By Maria Zakharova’s earlier account as the agency carried it, the ministers sum up the year, mark the CIS’s 35th anniversary and adopt decisions on cultural, humanitarian and law-enforcement cooperation and on foreign-policy coordination. They also approve a plan of consultations for 2027 and agree the next council’s date and venue, and most of the documents go on to the heads of state at Avaza on Friday and to the heads of government in Moscow in December.
On 30 September APA’s Moscow bureau had quoted Zakharova placing the council “in Ashgabat”. Interfax’s own line on Wednesday is Avaza.
The sea the declaration is written for stood at minus 29.42 metres in July at the Kulaly island station, the lowest reading of the whole observation period, by the Kazakh Caspian Sea research institute’s data as Euronews carried them on Wednesday. The Kazakh sector fell from minus 26.82 metres in 1996 to minus 29.27 in 2025, 2.45 metres in three decades, the studied north-eastern part lost about 16,384 square kilometres of water between 2000 and 2025, and a new island was spotted near Kulaly in aerial photography days ago, by the same data.
Azerbaijan’s Institute of Geography says the level has renewed the minimum of the last 48 years, below the minus 29.05 metres of 1977 in the Baltic system that the country’s hydrometeorological service counts as that period’s floor, in a release Newtimes.kz ran on 2 October. The stations and datums differ, and the series itself shows the swing Ushakov spoke of: minus 29.05 in 1977, minus 26.82 in 1996, minus 29.42 this July.
Friday’s declaration would sit on documents already signed. At the Tehran Convention’s seventh session in September the five signed a ministerial statement that incorporated Tokayev’s proposal of an interstate programme on the sea’s water resources, by the Kazakh government’s account as azh.kz carried it, and approved a programme of joint work for 2026 to 2027 on pollution, monitoring and information exchange, with the next session due in Kazakhstan, by Russia’s natural resources ministry’s release of 26 September. A plan of action on sea level fluctuation for 2026 to 2036 is being prepared under the convention, by the same Euronews account.
Pezeshkian will attend the Caspian summit and take part in the CIS council as a special guest, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei has said, News Central Asia reported on Tuesday, and the consultative meeting of 8 October is the first formal one since Azerbaijan became a full participant of the Central Asian format at Tashkent in November 2025, by the same site. Wednesday’s ministers go first. Their readout will show what the five put on paper beyond September’s statement, and Friday’s declaration what the presidents add to it.