Caucasus
Coverage across the South Caucasus — Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.
Pashinyan asks Putin to lift the export bans
Armenia’s prime minister raised the Russian restrictions with Putin by telephone on Monday, the day the dairy ban took effect, and told him they contradict both the bilateral treaty framework and the rules of the Eurasian Economic Union.
Armenia’s dairy ban takes effect
Russia’s restriction on Armenian dairy came into force on Monday. Yerevan’s food safety inspectorate says the joint inspection behind it found nothing of the kind.
One littoral state speaks about the Caspian
Turkmenistan called the attack on a vessel in the Caspian inadmissible and named nobody at all. Kyiv answered Tehran the same day, and Baku and Tehran shut each other’s broadcasters.
The war reaches the Caspian
Iran says a Ukrainian strike killed a sailor on one of its commercial ships in the Caspian. The detour Kazakhstan is counting on runs across that same sea.
Berlin signs the agenda, the numbers stay unwritten
Aliyev and Merz signed the Joint Declaration on the Strategic Agenda of German-Azerbaijani partnership on Tuesday, agreed to stand up a bilateral Economic Council, and talked gas at length. The watch lines our Tuesday piece set resolved the same way: intent everywhere, a number nowhere.
The first e-TIR truck heads for Turkmenistan
The first pilot shipment under the electronic TIR customs system between Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan began this week, the head of Azerbaijan’s road carriers association said: the cargo has already crossed from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan over the Caspian and moves on to Turkmenistan next.
Aliyev takes a strategic agenda to Berlin
Azerbaijan’s president is in Germany, with a Joint Declaration on the Strategic Agenda of bilateral partnership planned for his meeting with chancellor Friedrich Merz, per the state agency APA. The agenda runs through gas and the Middle Corridor, and the visit lands while Baku’s rupture with Moscow stays open.
An Armenian court clears the runway for the grid takeover
The Administrative Court has refused to accept Tashir Capital’s lawsuit against the government concerning 70% of the shares of Electric Networks of Armenia, the infrastructure ministry announced on Tuesday. The refusal lands days before the government is due to declare the company an overriding public interest, and it closes the owner’s last visible domestic avenue.
Armenia moves to take its power grid, and the price is the message
The public consultation on declaring Electric Networks of Armenia an overriding public interest closed on 8 July; the government decision is due in mid-July. Documents obtained by RFE/RL put the state’s net offer for a grid that absorbed some $900 million of investment at roughly $360,000. The decision will be read far beyond Yerevan.
Central Asia's westward corridor runs through Baku, and Baku is fighting Moscow
On 6 July Azerbaijan summoned Russia's ambassador and handed him a protest note over a Russian drone strike on a SOCAR fuel station in Ukraine. It was the latest blow in a dispute that has outlived the settlement both sides signed in April. For Central Asia the quarrel lands close to home: the westward trade routes Astana, Tashkent and Ashgabat are building all pass through the country now at odds with Moscow.
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.
Armenia's top court upholds the June election as the opposition vows to escalate
On 4 July Armenia's Constitutional Court rejected all seven opposition petitions and let the 7 June result stand, on the last day the law allowed. Nikol Pashinyan keeps his majority and his pro-Western course. Within the hour, five losing blocs answered that the legal fight is over and a political one begins.
Armenia's top court has one day left to rule on the June election
The Constitutional Court retired to deliberate on 1 July and must publish its verdict by the end of Saturday, 4 July, the last day the law allows. Seven opposition forces want the 7 June parliamentary result annulled. Expect the court to uphold it; the interest is in how it reasons, and what the losers do next.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Islamic Development Bank opens its annual meetings in Baku with $2.8 billion in approvals
The IsDB's 51st annual gathering opened in Baku on 16 June under the theme of regional integration. The bank approved $2.8 billion in financing at its board meeting and signed trade finance agreements with Tajikistan on the sidelines.
Two forums, one pitch: the region sells resilience as the war premium fades
In the same week, Tashkent and Baku are both courting global capital on a promise of stability and integration. The timing is telling: with the Iran war ending, the region has to win capital on fundamentals again, after a season when someone else’s crisis did the selling.