Kazakhstan
Seven leaders draw lots for the last word before Saturday
Kazakhstan's seven party leaders draw lots Tuesday morning, live on 24KZ, for the speaking order in Wednesday's final televised debate, the last set piece of the campaign before Saturday's Kurultai election.
The tanker is inside the port and nothing shows it loading
Aegean Dream’s port call log now reads arrived, Novorossiysk, Sunday 20:45 UTC. Every other signal reads dark: no live AIS fix since 10 August, ballast draught on the last one, no loading recorded, no departure.
Bishkek admits the generators tripped and rejects the blame
Kyrgyzstan’s energy ministry answered Kazakhstan’s account of Friday’s four-country blackout at midday on Monday: yes, two Toktogul hydrogenerators briefly disconnected, and no, that does not make Kyrgyzstan responsible for what followed. The same morning, at home, the cabinet chief was tearing into the ministry for 26 emergency outages in 18 months.
A $10.7 billion corruption claim surfaces inside the Kashagan arbitration
Kazakhstan is arguing in its closed arbitration against the Kashagan consortium that about a dozen contracts worth some $10.7 billion involved self-dealing, unjustified cost increases or bribery, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported on Friday. The allegation is the corruption limb of a claim that has grown to $160 billion.
Four countries lost power in one afternoon, and the operators blame each other
A cascading failure on Friday cut electricity in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan within minutes. Kazakhstan’s operator says the trigger sat at Toktogul, and Bishkek has not answered the claim.
The tank farm is full at Kazakhstan’s other Novorossiysk outlet
Crude exports through Sheskharis, the terminal that ships Kazakhstan’s KEBCO grade alongside Russian oil, halted on Friday after a tanker turned back to sea and the storage behind the pier reached its limit. No restart had surfaced in the wires by Monday morning, and the CPC terminal next door has now said nothing in its own name for 18 days.
Telegram went dark across Kazakhstan and nobody will name the cause
The messenger failed nationwide on Thursday morning, nine days before the parliamentary vote. The state operator says its own network was fine, the ministry says technicians are looking into it, and after service returned the operator answered the question directly: we do not know.
Novorossiysk halts its trains and its grain, and Kazakh oil keeps loading
Russian Railways closed loading toward the port for ten days on Thursday. One grain terminal stopped work the same day, another is repairing damage, and the harbour shuts twice today for live artillery practice. Kazakhstan’s crude leaves from a mooring fifteen kilometres west of all of it, and it is the one flow nobody has suspended.
Kazakhstan's parties debated as teams for the first time, and no one printed the promises
Seven parties put up two speakers each on Jibek Joly on Wednesday night, in the first team debates Kazakhstan has held. Adilet took 60.6% of the viewer poll that closed with the broadcast. The round in which each party made one concrete pledge has not been reproduced by any outlet that covered it.
The record rate to ship Kazakh oil is $440,948 a day
Daily earnings for a tanker running from Novorossiysk to Augusta reached $440,948 on Wednesday, the highest figure in a Baltic Exchange series that begins in July 2008. Washington's undertaking with Kyiv, three weeks old, covers the pipe and the terminal. The price is set somewhere else.
Kazakhstan’s oil route now rests on a phone call it was not part of
On 31 July, JD Vance asked Volodymyr Zelensky to stop striking the route Kazakhstan uses to sell most of its oil. Ukraine agreed not to target Caspian Pipeline Consortium infrastructure or non-Russian ships, and a US administration official has confirmed the warning. Last night’s attack on Novorossiysk, the heaviest of this crisis, was the first large test of that undertaking.
Nine hours over Novorossiysk, and the tanker due Thursday stays dark
Russia's largest Black Sea port spent the night of 11-12 August under a combined drone attack that ran past nine hours. The crude tanker due at the CPC terminal on Thursday morning has meanwhile been silent on AIS for more than 40 hours.
Kazakhstan sets its state chatbot a target of 150 services
The Tuesday cabinet in Astana spent its session on digital government and came out with dates. eGov GPT goes from 50 services to 150 by the end of the year, every public service centre becomes an artificial intelligence office by December, and the action plan for the whole programme is due within a week.
Kazakhstan’s economy grows around its shrinking oil
Seven-month GDP growth of 4.1% arrived on Tuesday morning with a second number attached: oil output down 8.9% year on year, at 53.2 million tonnes. It is an official, national-perimeter production number that takes in the crisis weeks, and it lands while the July numbers that would price them stay unpublished.
Central Asia agrees to meter the Syr Darya
The Interstate Commission for Water Coordination approved the development of a plan for automated water accounting across the Syr Darya basin at its 94th session in Turkestan, the Chronicles of Turkmenistan reported on Monday, citing Report.az.
Turkey reopens the straits without saying why it closed them
Tankers bound for Novorossiysk are moving again after a pause Ankara never explained and now calls a set of temporary measures. In Astana, the Energy Ministry put its detour list on the record on Monday.
KazMunayGas calls the $80 billion Kashagan report unreliable
The company’s chairman read the story and does not confirm it. Kursiv, which carried the report on Friday, now traces it to Bloomberg.
Turkey pauses the straits, and Kazakh oil waits
From Thursday to Sunday, vessels bound for Novorossiysk could not get permits to transit the Turkish straits. The pause revealed a second gate on Kazakhstan’s main export route, and nobody in Astana holds the key.
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan clear 19 product groups of barriers from Monday
Tariff and non-tariff barriers come off 19 categories of trade between the two countries on 10 August, from cotton fibre and grain to construction materials and machinery. Two-way trade ran about $5 billion in 2025 and grew 38% in the first five months of this year.
Exxon offers $80 billion for Kashagan, and asks Astana to settle first
ExxonMobil has tied a proposed $80 billion expansion of the Kashagan field to settling Kazakhstan's claims against the consortium that runs it, Kursiv reported on Friday, citing sources close to the talks. Those claims come to about $150 billion.