Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan denies bombing a refinery, then builds 59 checkpoints against its fallout
Kazakhstan spent Thursday rejecting Russian claims that Ukraine's drones on the Omsk refinery were launched from its territory. In the same news cycle, its own police were manning 59 new checkpoints to stop Russian drivers from draining its gas stations dry. Astana is absorbing both ends of a war it is not fighting.
Five Years Ahead: the grid is Kazakhstan's real AI strategy
Astana is buying chips, signing frameworks and courting both Washington and Beijing on artificial intelligence. Almost none of that requires it to generate a single extra watt. Five years out, the constraint that decides how this ends runs through the grid.
Orenburg is back to a quarter of its normal intake from Kazakhstan's Karachaganak
Two weeks after a drone strike forced Kazakhstan to cut oil output at its giant Karachaganak field, the Russian plant that processes its gas is still running far below capacity. Kazakh officials say Orenburg is taking just 28% of its usual volume, and the Caspian Pipeline Consortium is cutting July exports 6% as a result.
Kazakhstan signs crypto decree that lets miners run on gas the grid doesn't need
President Tokayev signed a decree on 8 July laying out rules for a regulated digital-asset market, stablecoins, tax breaks and tokenised government bonds. One detail stands out: crypto miners can now be powered by associated petroleum and natural gas when the state doesn't need it for other purposes.
Kazakhstan's oil runs through a Russian switch, and a drone just flipped it
Kazakhstan is Central Asia's largest oil producer, yet on 24 June a Ukrainian drone 170 km inside Russia cut its crude output by a quarter at one giant field. Karachaganak's gas is processed in Russia, at a plant Astana does not control, and when that plant burned, Kazakh oil had to stop with it. The region's energy heavyweight commands its own barrels less than its size suggests.
Kazakhstan's court hands Tokayev the reset he said he would never seek
On 7 July Kazakhstan's Constitutional Court ruled that the term Kassym-Jomart Tokayev is serving does not count under the new constitution, so he may run again in 2029. The single seven-year limit stays on paper. Tokayev wrote that limit in 2022 as proof he would not cling to power, and today, at his own request, the court drained it of force.
Georgia's surrogacy boom runs on women recruited from Central Asia
An Oxford study published on 16 June maps a quiet labour chain. Clinics in Georgia, short of local surrogates since 2022, now recruit women from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan through Instagram and TikTok. The pregnancies are sold as paid work, and the controls around them sit outside the law.
Kazakhstan's lithium ambition runs into the gap between a lab and a plant
The industry ministry says Kazakh scientists have pulled lithium from low-grade ore at a concentration standard methods cannot reach. It is a laboratory result. The country's aim, to process critical minerals rather than ship the rock, still turns on money and scale it does not yet have.
The gasoline Kazakhstan might send Russia would be made from Russian oil
Reuters reported that Kazakhstan agreed to ship 50,000 tons of gasoline to Russia as humanitarian aid. Astana's energy ministry says no formal request has arrived, and the only fuel it might send would be refined from Russian feedstock. That detail decides how to read the story.
The ceiling on Kazakhstan’s AI ambitions is the grid
This week Kazakhstan formalised its bid to become Central Asia’s computing power. The arithmetic of its electricity system will decide how much of that bid survives to 2031.
Kazakhstan pitches investors an AI state built on a strained grid
At the 38th Foreign Investors’ Council in Astana, President Tokayev put artificial intelligence, digital sovereignty and critical minerals at the centre of Kazakhstan’s investment offer. The pitch is coherent. The power system underneath it is the open question.
Kazakhstan sets the first Kurultai election for 23 August
Hours after the new constitution took effect on 1 July, Tokayev signed the decree calling elections to the single-chamber Kurultai for 23 August. The campaign for Kazakhstan’s first party-list-only parliament now has a date.
Before the first Kurultai vote, the ruling camp rearranges itself
Kazakhstan’s first single-chamber parliament will be chosen in August, entirely by party list. In the weeks before the constitution took effect, the parties that will contest it changed shape: the ruling party folded into a new one, and three others changed leaders. The field is being set before the campaign starts.
The new charter builds a succession machine, and its first parts are already turning
The constitution that takes effect today brings back the vice presidency, an office abolished in the 1990s and now written as the route by which presidential power would pass. Tokayev says he is not going early. The machine is being assembled anyway, and the first personnel move came this week.
Kazakhstan’s new constitution takes effect, and the president keeps the tools of the rebuild
The constitution Kazakhstan approved in March takes effect today. The bicameral parliament that has stood since 1995 loses its powers, a single-chamber Kurultai will be elected in August, and until it convenes the president can rule by decree. The rebuild is real, and it leaves the instruments of the transition in one set of hands.
Tokayev moves Karin to the controls of the apparatus on the eve of the new constitution
On 30 June, a day before Kazakhstan’s new constitution takes effect, Tokayev named Erlan Karin first deputy head of the presidential administration, moving the architect of the state’s governing ideology into the machine that will run the August Kurultai election.
Kazakhstan rewrites its constitution, and three capitals are reading it
On 1 July a new constitution takes effect in Kazakhstan, sold as modernisation. The question worth asking is who it is for, at home and in the three capitals that read Astana closely.
A $1.4 billion Gulf wind farm breaks ground in southern Kazakhstan, aimed at the lights and the data centres
Construction began on 29 June on a 1 gigawatt wind farm in Kazakhstan’s Zhambyl region, led by the Emirati developer Masdar at a cost of $1.4 billion. It is meant to ease southern Kazakhstan’s power shortages, and the same day Masdar signed up to explore round-the-clock clean power for the country’s data centres.
Kazakhstan is Europe’s third-biggest oil supplier now. Its own output is falling
Kazakhstan was the European Union’s third-largest supplier of crude oil in the first quarter of 2026, Eurostat data show, behind only the United States and Norway. It is a prize won from Russia’s exit, and a perch Kazakhstan may struggle to hold, because its own production is sliding.
Kazakhstan and Georgia sign a strategic partnership, and the Middle Corridor gets a spine
Kazakhstan and Georgia signed a strategic partnership in Astana on 29 June, with the Trans-Caspian corridor at its centre. It binds the two ends of the route that carries Central Asian goods to Europe without crossing Russia, and it quietly extends Kazakhstan into the Caucasus by way of that corridor.