Russia
Half of Ulaanbaatar’s cars come off the road the day the fuel cap lapses
From 15 August to 12 September, city wide and with no zoning, cars may enter Ulaanbaatar traffic only on alternating days by plate parity, between 07:00 and 21:00. The window covers the desertification conference, the start of the school year, and the morning the petrol rationing expires. Nobody has published how many days of fuel the country holds.
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.
Nobody in Tatarstan's government has said the word citizenship
Tatarstan began paying compensation for the Nizhnekamsk deaths on Wednesday. One outlet reports that the money goes to every family regardless of citizenship. That sentence appears in no primary text the desk can find.
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.
Russia now cancels a migrant’s work patent with nobody deciding to
Since 10 August the Russian interior ministry has run a service that automatically invalidates a foreign worker’s patent when the monthly tax advance goes unpaid.
Tashkent will name its compensation when Moscow finishes investigating
Eight Uzbek citizens killed at Nizhnekamsk on 10 August flew home on Wednesday aboard an Uzbek defence ministry aircraft, at state expense. Asked what their families will be paid, the migration agency in Tashkent said the figure will be known once the Russian investigation ends. Tatarstan started paying its own families the same day.
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.
Inflation reaches 13% in the country that counts petrol by the litre
Mongolia's July consumer prices rose 13.0% year on year, and the central bank called its monetary policy committee into an extraordinary session for Wednesday afternoon. The fuel ledger, meanwhile, is declared full for August, on Ulaanbaatar's arithmetic alone.
The injured are recounted before the dead can fly home
Uzbekistan's working group reached Nizhnekamsk on Tuesday evening. The special flight it came to organise still has no date, and the official counts of the wounded moved twice in a day.
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.
Russia's first answer on the Black Sea moratorium comes from a Duma deputy
Turkey's proposal for a moratorium on maritime strikes drew its first Russian pushback on Tuesday, at parliamentary level.
Mongolia's ministry publishes the Moscow promise, and Russia says nothing
The claim that Russia will send Mongolia an extra 25,000 tonnes of petrol this month moved on Tuesday from a minister's social account to his ministry's own website. No Russian institution has confirmed it.
Moscow answers Armenia's trade complaint with a calendar
Nikol Pashinyan named the Russian import restrictions at the Eurasian Intergovernmental Council on Friday. Russia replied on Tuesday. The reply came from the foreign ministry, and it carried three dates.
Uzbekistan's answer to eight dead workers is a special flight
Tashkent's response to the deaths of eight of its citizens at Nizhnekamsk arrived on Tuesday as logistics. A working group flew to Kazan, the emergencies ministry said the bodies would come home on a special flight, and no Uzbek government text named who fired the drones.
The shipping war’s damaged ships head for the yards
Two of the vessels hit off Novorossiysk this month now have names and destinations: the container ship LDR Yasar is under damage assessment in Samsun, and the dry cargo carrier Gulluk is sailing to Istanbul for repairs.
Rosatom signs for 100 megawatts of Kyrgyz wind
Rosatom’s wind arm, the Russian-Kyrgyz Development Fund and the Eurasian Development Bank have signed for a 100 MW wind farm at Kok-Moinok in the Issyk-Kul region. The signature is five days old; the full public record of it assembled only this week.
A drone strike on Tatarstan kills eight Uzbek workers
Ukrainian drones struck Nizhnekamsk in Tatarstan on Monday and killed at least 13 people, among them 8 Uzbek construction workers and a 30-year-old Tajik. Tashkent formed a government commission the same day and flies a working group to Russia today.
Nine trips in a year: Mongolia’s fuel envoy starts in Moscow
The minister running Mongolia’s fuel crisis named his route on Sunday: Moscow first, then Kazakhstan, then Beijing. The itinerary carries its own message: whatever China agrees to supply, the system still runs through Russia.
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.