Akorda’s statement was on Zakon.kz at 09:02 Astana time on Sunday 27 September, two days after the search for the crew of the patrol boat Qaisar ended at 14 dead and 3 rescued, and it ran to one sentence: Kosanov Dauren Zhumatayevich is relieved of the post of minister of defence. A second decree, number 1507, appointed Aidos Sakenovich Myrzakhmetov and relieved him of his previous post. The biography the ministry published at 13:52 gives that post as commander of the Special Operations Forces since January 2024.
Kosanov, a lieutenant general of aviation, had run the ministry since June 2025 and was reappointed in September. On Saturday he visited the families of the dead. The same day Tokayev ordered a comprehensive check of the state of affairs in the ministry by a commission that has 7 days to report its first results to him.
A second decree, number 1507, appointed Aidos Sakenovich Myrzakhmetov and relieved him of his previous post.
On Sunday the president met the ministry’s leadership, opened with a minute’s silence for the 14 and called their deaths in peacetime the consequence of officers’ unprofessionalism. He demanded that the circumstances of the tragedy and the concept of the exercise be established, said the servicemen had not been issued the necessary equipment, life jackets included, and that ranks and posts exempt nobody from responsibility. The incident, he said, had revealed numerous shortcomings in the army.
Three tasks came in order for the new minister: how efficiently the ministry spends its budget, a reform of the Armed Forces, and what Akorda calls ideological work. The Security Council’s apparatus and the ministry have 10 days to submit a military reform plan, which the president will examine in the second half of October.
That gives the accident two clocks. The commission’s 7 days run out around 3 October; the plan’s 10 days on 7 October; the decision comes in the second half of the month. Three inquiries now run side by side: the government commission under deputy prime minister Kanat Bozumbayev, set up on 24 September, the presidential check of the ministry, and the criminal case.
Five officers were detained on 25 September, accused of negligence in service under article 453 part 2 of the Criminal Code and of breaching the rules of navigation under article 465. The ministry’s statement of that day names their posts and no names: the Navy’s chief of staff and first deputy commander, two unit commanders, the commander of a marine infantry company and the commander of the boat. None of the statements carried by Kazinform, Zakon or Akorda since 25 September prints a name, a defence position or the penalties the two articles carry.
Myrzakhmetov is 45: he finished the Military Academy of the Armed Forces with distinction in 2002, rose through command posts in the State Security Service, the presidential guard, took the Special Operations Forces in January 2024, graduated from the National Defence University in 2025 and became a major general in May. He holds the Order of Aibyn, second class, from 2022. The ministry passes from an aviation general to a special forces officer whose career ran through the presidential guard.
The ministry was still fighting the accident’s rumours on Monday morning. Two conscript sailors named on social networks, Akhmetov and Magauiya, had been on the shore during the exercise and are in their unit on the daily schedule, it said in a statement Kazinform carried at 09:26; Kazinform’s headline called the report one more fake, and the ministry asked citizens not to spread unverified information and to rely on its official statements.
What the plan will say is the question for October. Tokayev’s first task for the new minister was money, his second the structure of the forces; the exercise’s design, the orders under which the Qaisar was at sea when the weather turned on 24 September, and the missing life jackets sit somewhere between the two. Of the four processes the accident has set running, the three inquiries and the plan, only the plan has a date for a decision.