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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.
Mirziyoyev ends a 23-year pause in Tbilisi, and Georgia gains a second Central Asian partner
The first Uzbek state visit to Georgia since 2003 brought a declaration of strategic partnership, Georgia’s highest state award and a package of agreements. Kazakhstan signed its own strategic partnership with Tbilisi three days earlier. The western gate of the Middle Corridor is signing up its shippers.
Kyrgyzstan asks six countries to keep its petrol flowing
Bishkek has sent official requests for stable fuel supplies to Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Belarus and Russia itself. A country that buys about 90% of its petrol from one supplier is now shopping in every direction at once.
Armenia’s June vote heads to the Constitutional Court, with a 4 July deadline
Seven opposition parties are asking Armenia’s Constitutional Court to overturn the June parliamentary election that returned Nikol Pashinyan’s party to power. The court must finish reviewing the petitions by 4 July, and the election commission has already ordered a recount at several polling stations.
Kyrgyzstan has passed a full year’s mudflows in six months, and the bill lands on infrastructure
Kyrgyzstan logged more than 240 mudflows in the first half of 2026, already past the 133 recorded in all of 2024. The emergencies ministry ties the surge to heavier, less predictable rain. The deeper story is what a warming climate does to a mountain state that cannot afford to armour its roads, rivers and grids fast enough.
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.
Uzbekistan’s petrol price hits a record as the regional fuel squeeze spreads
AI-92 petrol on Uzbekistan’s commodity exchange reached 13.9 million soums a ton on 29 June, about $1,160 and the highest level ever recorded. The jump lands while Russia restricts fuel exports, Kazakhstan’s biggest refinery sits in maintenance, and Uzbekistan’s own output keeps falling.
Over a third of Tajikistan’s exports now go to one country, and it is Switzerland
Switzerland became Tajikistan’s third-largest trading partner in January-May, overtaking Kazakhstan, and its largest export market by far: 36.3% of everything Tajikistan sold abroad, worth $508 million, went to one Alpine country. The likely cargo is gold, and the pattern says as much about Tajikistan’s budget as about its trade.
Who guards Tajikistan’s Afghan border while Russia is tied down in Ukraine
The Russia-led security bloc says the Tajik-Afghan frontier is its main problem in Central Asia, and it plans to send more help. Russia is stretched thin in Ukraine, and China, which has major assets to protect inside Tajikistan, has so far left the job to Moscow. That arrangement is starting to look fragile.
Central Asia’s shortcut to the sea runs through a war
Landlocked Central Asia wants a fast route to the ocean through Afghanistan and Pakistan. The war between them has shut that door for now, and it is pushing Afghanistan’s own trade north into Central Asia instead. Both shifts redraw the region’s map of dependence.
Armenia is about to take its national grid from a Russia-linked billionaire under house arrest
Armenia’s government says it will declare the country’s electricity distribution monopoly an asset of overriding public interest in mid-July, the last legal step before it takes the grid from Samvel Karapetyan. The tycoon is under house arrest, his company is fighting in international arbitration, and the offer on the table would let the state acquire a network valued by outside estimates at roughly $360 million for close to nothing.
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.
Mongolia’s energy workers begin an indefinite strike, testing a grid that leans on imports
From 8 a.m. on 30 June, energy-sector workers across Mongolia walked out for an indefinite strike after wage talks broke down, their union federation said. Only emergency crews stayed on, leaving a power system that already runs on aging plants and imported electricity under added strain.
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.