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Armenia's Constitutional Court takes up the Trump route at 11:00, 6 days after Baku dated the first works to 2027
The court sits on Tuesday morning to say whether the framework agreement Yerevan signed with Washington in June, a 49-year company that is 74% American on land Armenia keeps, fits the constitution. The ruling is the step before parliament. The calendar for the route itself has already been written elsewhere.
A drone hits a Turkish-flagged Ro-Ro on the Novorossiysk run; Ankara’s press index is still on Syria
The Lionfish, a 139-metre container and Ro-Ro ship built in 1997, under the Turkish flag and operated by Istanbul’s Feeder Link Denizcilik, was hit by a drone in the Black Sea, the Chamber of Shipping’s records showed early on Sunday, Haber Denizde reported; a container caught fire and was put out, no one was hurt, and the ship carried on to Trabzon. The chamber’s record had her sailing from Ambarli to Novorossiysk, the port that ships most of Kazakhstan’s oil; DenizHaber’s account on Sunday afternoon had the voyage as Ambarli to Trabzon, one Turkish port to another, and left the question of who fired open.
Armenia’s Russian gas stops for 11 days from Tuesday; Gazprom Armenia says Iranian volumes and storage cover it
Gazprom Armenia said on Monday that deliveries of Russian gas will be suspended from 15 to 25 September for planned preventive and overhaul work on the section of the North Caucasus-South Caucasus pipeline inside Russia, and that consumers will be supplied ‘without restrictions’ from internal reserves and additional volumes from Iran. The same day the State Revenue Committee reported that its chairman, Eduard Hakobyan, had signed in Iran with Iran’s customs chief Foroud Asgari a protocol on exchanging advance data on goods and vehicles, the ‘simplified customs corridor’, and the sides agreed to extend the joint use of the Meghri-Nordooz crossing.
Georgia changes its security chief for the second time in 5 months; a career officer takes the service
Gela Geladze resigned as head of the State Security Service on Monday after four and a half months in the post, and prime minister Irakli Kobakhidze named his deputy, Tamaz Borashvili, to replace him, the first career officer of the service to head it in two decades, in the prime minister’s words. Geladze moves to a deputy minister’s post at the interior ministry he ran until April.
Georgia remands an opposition leader over a television line about the 1992 war, on treason and sabotage charges that carry up to 4 years
Tbilisi City Court on Saturday ordered Giorgi Baramidze, a former defence and interior minister and a member of the United National Movement’s political council, held in pretrial detention, a day after the Prosecutor General’s Office charged him with treason, ‘specifically sabotage’, over a July television interview in which he said Georgian fighters early in the 1992 to 1993 Abkhaz war took no prisoners and shot them. The charge carries up to 4 years; Baramidze told the court his words were misinterpreted.
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.
Overchuk holds out a full free-trade zone for Mongolia after 3 years, on a schedule of dairy, chocolate, cars and metals
Russia’s deputy prime minister Alexei Overchuk told reporters in Ulaanbaatar on Monday that the EAEU’s temporary trade agreement with Mongolia, in force since 22 July, should become a permanent, full-format free-trade agreement once its 3-year term has run. The schedule that agreement carries zeroes or cuts duties on 367 tariff lines each way; the goods listed on Russia’s side at entry into force, in Interfax’s report from the Eurasian Economic Commission, were dairy, confectionery, tinned food, chocolate, drinks, cars, special machinery and metals.
Mongolia’s parliament closes its budget session one reading short, and reopens on Tuesday to finish the rewrite
The State Great Khural ended the extraordinary session it had called for the 2026 budget rewrite on Monday evening with the amendment passed at second reading and sent back to committee for a third. The regular autumn session opens on 15 September by law, and the rewrite goes first on its agenda, with the 2027 budget after it, ikon.mn reported.
A letter about an election, filed under crimes against elections
Kyrgyzstan’s appeal court swapped one article for another. The men who signed the letter will now watch parliament schedule the vote they asked for.
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.
Ashgabat’s Cabinet met by video on Friday and booked a state visit to Seoul
President Serdar Berdimuhamedov held a Cabinet of Ministers sitting by digital link, the government’s site shows inside a post published on Saturday on a state visit to the Republic of Korea for the first Central Asia-Korea summit; a relay of the readout dates the sitting to 11 September and lists a plan for the 35th anniversary of independence among its decisions. The site’s last sitting published under its own heading is dated 28 August.
Drones reach the Nizhnekamsk refineries as Trump tells Kyiv to leave Russia’s diesel alone
A drone attack on Nizhnekamsk, the Tatarstan town whose industrial zone holds the TANECO and TAIF-NK refineries, killed 2 people and injured 14 early on Sunday, and by evening the US president was telling reporters in Ireland that Volodymyr Zelensky “has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia”. Sixteen days remain of the ban that keeps Russian producers’ diesel at home.
Uzbekistan’s biggest bank joins China’s payment rail as Astana and Tashkent link their QR codes
The National Bank of Uzbekistan became the country’s first direct participant in CIPS, China’s yuan clearing system, on 9 September and, during a Hong Kong visit on 9 and 10 September, agreed a $250 million bond in yuan and som for the Hong Kong exchange with CICC; on Friday Kazakhstan’s National Payment Corporation and Uzbekistan’s HUMO signed up to accept each other’s QR codes. Two new pipes are going into the region’s payment plumbing.
Uzbekistan’s president takes the chair of the financial centre’s board by his own decree, with his daughter as managing director
A presidential decree on the launch of the Tashkent International Financial Centre makes the head of state the ex officio chairman of its supervisory board and confirms Saida Mirziyoyeva as managing director alongside her post at the head of the presidential administration, UzDaily reported on Saturday evening.
Kyrgyzstan’s central bank made 45.7 billion som last year, and the finance ministry credits Kumtor’s gold
The National Bank of the Kyrgyz Republic earned 45.7 billion som in 2025, three times the year before, and the reason is its right to buy gold from the state-run Kumtor mine, the deputy finance minister told a parliamentary committee on Monday. The same hearing put the debt to China at $1.4 billion and 16% of budget revenue.
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.
Kyrgyzstan's January election comes with a 1 million som fee that not even the winner gets back
The chairman of the Central Election Commission, Tynchtyk Shainazarov, has set out, in remarks 24.kg published on Friday, how the presidential election of 27 January 2027 will run: a contribution of 1 million som ($11,400) from each candidate's election fund that the budget keeps whatever the result, at least 30,000 signatures with electronic signing through the Tunduk portal allowed, an agitation period from 22 or 23 December, and a vote on a Wednesday instead of a Sunday. Parliament calls the election on 24 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.
A ₮3.5 billion line for a school tied to the family of Mongolia's prime minister surfaces in the budget rewrite, and the ministry has not published the list
A member of the State Great Khural says the government's amendment to the 2026 budget carries 3.5 billion tugrik ($970,000) for the Ikh Zasag King school, which prime minister Nyam-Osoryn Uchral himself calls the school connected to his family. The prime minister says the school asked for nothing, the finance minister says nothing was allocated to it, and the education ministry has yet to publish which schools share the 18 billion tugrik line the sum sits in.