Tajikistan
Seoul’s summit week opens on minerals, with a new ministers’ channel and $1 billion of Korean cofinancing pledged in May
South Korea held the first meeting of industry ministers with the five Central Asian states in Seoul on Monday, with critical minerals, lithium and rare earths among them, as one of its main lines, 2 days before the first Korea-Central Asia summit. The same day Lee Jae-myung exchanged 13 documents with Shavkat Mirziyoyev, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev landed on a state visit, and the Asian Development Bank’s president Masato Kanda met finance minister Koo Yun-cheol about the minerals facility to which Korea Eximbank and K-SURE each pledged $500 million in May.
Dushanbe pencils in 1.55 million tonnes of imported fuel for 2027 at $1.12 billion, with the neighbours supplying 34,000 tonnes in July
Tajikistan’s forecast for 2027 puts petroleum-product imports at 1.55 million tonnes, 7.8% more than this year and about $1.12 billion, Asia-Plus reported on Saturday. In the first half of 2026, 91.1% of the 599,500 tonnes imported came from Russia under a 2013 agreement that carries no export duty, and the summer’s turn to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan reached about 34,000 tonnes in July.
Who sets the price of petrol: six machines between one Russian exchange and the pump
Central Asia and Mongolia buy most of their fuel from Russia and price it six different ways. A tour of the machinery, from Bishkek's dollar wall to Ashgabat's two price tags, and what each one does when the exchange in St Petersburg moves.
Russia keeps its pumps on Euro-2 to June 2027 while its export bans hold, Novak tells the government
Deputy prime minister Alexander Novak has reported the state of the fuel market to a government subcommission chaired by first deputy prime minister Denis Manturov, Kommersant reported on Thursday evening: exports of petrol, diesel and jet fuel are banned, the Tax Code has been amended to create the conditions for fuel imports, and filling stations may sell fuel of ecological classes K2, K3 and K4, Euro-2 to Euro-4, under a temporary permit. The permit rests on a government resolution reported on 31 August and runs from 1 September to 30 June 2027. The bans are the ones already on record, and the producers' diesel ban ends on 30 September.
The World Bank's new Tajikistan programme replaces grants with credits from July and rates its own risk as high
The Bank's Country Partnership Framework for fiscal years 2026 to 2032, which its board discussed on 3 June and Asia-Plus read in full on Friday, sets an indicative $1 billion to $1.2 billion of IDA money over 7 years, moves the country from IDA grants to IDA credits from fiscal year 2027, and assesses the overall risk of the programme as high. On the Bank's calendar fiscal year 2027 began on 1 July 2026. The document is 3 months old; the terms in it are already running.
Barki Tojik books a 2.45 billion somoni profit made of currency gains while owing 8.36 billion to the plants that power it
The 2025 accounts of Tajikistan's power utility, published by the energy ministry and read by Asia-Plus on Thursday, show a net operating profit of 2.45 billion somoni, $265 million, after a loss of 1.6 billion in 2024, and the line that made the difference is 2.93 billion somoni of net income from foreign-currency operations. Beneath it sit 29.3 billion somoni of accumulated losses, 23.26 billion of financial obligations and 8.36 billion owed to the generators, Rogun among them. The auditor kept its warning.
The UN's debt expert asks Dushanbe for the sums behind its projects as the grant era ends in 2027
Attiya Waris, the UN independent expert on foreign debt, ended a 12-day visit to Tajikistan on 31 August with a statement that reached the English-language wires through Eurasianet on 8 September: the government's actions “are not sufficiently visible to the public”, fiscal decisions “should be a transparent and participatory process”, the state should “prepare a cost-benefit analysis of all the government projects”, and from 2027 the country “will move from grant-based financing to concessional lending”. The latest poverty rate she cites is from 2018. Eight days after her statement, the president read the nation a ledger in which GDP had grown almost 100 times.
Russia's defence minister tells Dushanbe the Afghan border gets special attention and its drone units get Russian help
Andrei Belousov used a reception for the 35th anniversary of Tajikistan's independence on Tuesday evening to say that Moscow pays special attention to strengthening the Tajik-Afghan border and takes an active part in forming the republic's aviation, unmanned-systems and special-purpose units, TASS and Izvestia reported. A week after Putin met Rahmon in Bishkek, the visit put the Russian defence minister in Dushanbe on the eve of the holiday.
The upstream no longer asks: what the Nile's war of nerves means for the Amu Darya
On 9 September the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam turns one and Tajikistan turns 35. The dates share a plot: a poor upstream state builds the largest thing it has ever built on a river the downstream lives by. Egypt answered with letters to the Security Council and got a year of arguments about floods. Uzbekistan answered with a railway, a gas valve and a decade of threats, then settled for a 20-year tariff with the World Bank's money behind the dam. On the Amu Darya's other bank a third builder has taken the Ethiopian script line for line, and there is no bank, no tariff and no treaty with which to buy it.
Rahmon's 35-year ledger runs in somoni: GDP up 100 times, budget revenue up 250 times, energy independence in 2027
In his address for Tajikistan's 35th independence day, published by Khovar at noon on Tuesday, Emomali Rahmon put GDP at 177 billion somoni in 2025 against 1.8 billion in 2000, state budget revenue at 65 billion somoni this year against 252 million, and the arrival of "energy independence" at the third Rogun unit in 2027. The multipliers are nominal sums in somoni; the dollar ledger the World Bank keeps reads $17.6 billion of GDP, and remittances at 47.9% of it.
Tajikistan lays the first stone of a 50,000-tonne refining line against last year's 1.21 million tonnes of imports
A processing line rated at 50,000 tonnes of oil products a year was founded on Saturday at Salosa LLC in Jaikhun district, Khatlon, the Ministry of Energy and Water Resources said in a report carried by Asia-Plus on Monday. The company makes road bitumen from its own heavy crude and plans diesel and petrol once the line and new equipment are in; the Antimonopoly Service's import figure for 2025, 1.21 million tonnes worth $959.3 million and about 84% of it Russian, sizes the line at 4% of a year's imports.
On the map in your pocket, Russia is 10 Central Asias. On the ground it is 4.3
The UN General Assembly voted on Friday to push the world's maps away from Mercator, for Africa's sake. CAW ran the same arithmetic across Eurasia: the standard web map hands Russia a latitude premium that doubles its visual weight against Central Asia, and hands Central Asia a premium of its own against every neighbour to its south and east. Correcting the map takes the northern half of that bargain away.
Russian exchange diesel falls 8.8% in the week its producers were locked in
Summer diesel on the St Petersburg exchange ended Friday at 68,610 roubles a tonne, 8.76% below the previous Friday by the national index Interfax publishes, after the government kept producers' exports shut to 30 September. AI-92 fell 4.38% on Thursday to 68,945 and ended the week at 68,805. At the central bank's rate that is $792 a tonne, $168 under the $960 reference Kyrgyzstan's subsidy is written against, and diesel at $790 sits $260 under its $1,050 line.
Dushanbe asks the EBRD to design its solar auctions, single buyer included
The EBRD has taken on the design of competitive auctions for solar power in Tajikistan, two projects of about 200 MW each, at the request of the energy ministry. The bank's project page, disclosed on 5 August and reported in Dushanbe on Wednesday, pairs the auctions with advice on "a new market operator/single buyer entity".
The OPEC Fund lends Dushanbe $30 million for 82 km of the road to China
The Vienna-based fund will finance the first stage of the Rushan to Varzesh reconstruction in Gorno-Badakhshan, 82.2 of 235 km on the corridor that runs from Dushanbe through Kulma to the Chinese border, Asia-Plus reported on Wednesday.
Diesel in Dushanbe is up 50% since June, and no budget stands between the pump and the border
Asia-Plus priced diesel in the Tajik capital at about 16.50 somoni a litre on 31 August, 5.50 somoni above early June. Bishkek fixes a dollar reference and runs a compensation formula from its budget; Ulaanbaatar holds a regulated pump price and manages the shortfall by the monthly book. Dushanbe does neither, so the whole adjustment lands on the pump.
The remittance machine gets a new price list
From 1 September a migrant in Moscow carries a phone that reports where he sleeps, pays 10,000 roubles a month for the right to work, and sends money home over rails the EU has started to sanction. The money keeps coming. What changed is what each dollar of it now costs.
Russian exchange petrol prints a record $86 under the price Bishkek fixed
AI-92 rose 4.36% to 75,477 roubles a tonne on the St Petersburg exchange on Tuesday, a level Kommersant reports as a record, while AI-95 and diesel fell. At the central bank's rate for the day that is about $874, within $90 of the $960 reference price Kyrgyzstan wrote into its subsidy decree last week.
Dushanbe and Yerevan agree to convene their economic commission
Rahmon and Pashinyan used the SCO sidelines in Bishkek to line up the next session of the Tajik-Armenian intergovernmental commission on trade and economic cooperation, with business forums to follow. No documents were signed.
Dushanbe's fuel ask of Iran is mostly crude
Emomali Rahmon and Masoud Pezeshkian met on the summit's margins in Bishkek on Monday, with a request on the table that Dushanbe sized in August: 2.55 million tonnes of Iranian oil a year, most of it unrefined.