Economy
Business and investment
All of Tajikistan’s imported wheat now comes from one country
Tajikistan bought 660,800 tonnes of wheat abroad in the first half of 2026, every tonne of it from Kazakhstan, while its own output fell 13.3% to 510,000 tonnes.
Turkmenistan reports growth the IMF cannot find
Ashgabat’s half-year review claims GDP growth of 6.3%. The IMF projects 2.4% for the year and says it builds its own estimates because the official numbers are hard to reconcile with anything else.
The lake the region meets on is losing its ice
Kyrgyzhydromet has measured what the heat is doing. A third of the Issyk-Kul basin’s glacier area is gone against the early catalogues, 23.1% of it in the past 7 to 10 years, and the region’s summits keep convening on the shore of the evidence.
Bektenov turns shelf access into a directive
Kazakhstan’s Tuesday cabinet put first-half manufacturing output at 16 trillion tenge, about $34 billion at Tuesday’s official rate, up 9.8%, and ordered fair access to retail chains for the goods behind the number.
ExxonMobil promises Kazakhstan the long term
Three days after Chevron’s chief executive spoke for the CPC, ExxonMobil’s upstream president sat with the prime minister in Astana and confirmed, in the government’s readout, plans for a long-term presence in Kazakh oil and gas.
Kashagan’s arbitration deadline passes in silence
The end-July date for seating the arbitral panel has passed; no announcement of its composition has surfaced, and the enforcement the arbitration was meant to check keeps running.
A cable starts across the Caspian floor
Laying of the Kazakhstan-Azerbaijan fibre-optic cable began on Friday from Baku toward Aktau, Kazakhstan’s digital development ministry said, with 15 to 20 days of marine work ahead and commissioning promised by the end of the year.
The western workaround acquires statistics at Batumi
Batumi port moved more than 4 million tonnes in the first half of 2026, up 8%, its press service said on 30 July. The port and its oil terminal are run by KazTransOil’s Georgian subsidiary, which makes the figure a Kazakh number as much as a Georgian one.
The ADB puts $250 million into the road around Tbilisi
The Asian Development Bank approved a $250 million loan on 30 July for an 18.9-kilometre four-lane bypass of the Georgian capital, framing it as freight relief on the corridor that links Central Asia to Europe.
Ashgabat gives the EBRD five doors to knock on
EBRD president Odile Renaud-Basso signed a package of five memorandums in Ashgabat on 28 July, among them a 2027–2032 strategy framework with the Central Bank of Turkmenistan. President Serdar Berdimuhamedov received her the following day.
Kazakhstan’s oil export duty falls 23% for August
Kazakhstan will levy $76 on each tonne of exported crude and light products in August, down from $99 in July, as its price-linked duty formula tracks a weaker oil price. The cut lands on volumes already thinned by the closure of the CPC route, so the state’s oil take shrinks on rate and quantity at once.
The war on Russia’s warehouses arrives in Kazakhstan
Ukrainian drone strikes on Wildberries’ Russian warehouses have burned through the stock of Kazakh sellers who trade on the platform, and they are pushing Wildberries and Ozon to move warehousing south into Kazakhstan. The first move costs Kazakh small traders real money now; the second offers Kazakhstan a larger logistics business, though not a cheap one.
A tungsten mine for a million tonnes of ore a year
Patokh Shodiev and Mukadaskhan Ibragimova, with a Chinese partner, will develop the Bayan tungsten deposit in North Kazakhstan region. Peak output is put at 1 million tonnes of ore a year, and the first year at 2,820 tonnes.
Kabul turns to its northern door
The Taliban economic commission approved expanding trade through Sher Khan Port with Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and China, and told the public works ministry to build the Afghan section of an ECO rail corridor.
Bishkek finds 40 companies at sanctions risk, and closes three
About 40 companies carrying heightened sanctions risk have been identified in Kyrgyzstan since the start of July. Three have been shut and a cryptocurrency licence revoked, and the three match names on the European Union’s new list.
The corridor and the war now share one sea
Peskov called the strikes in the Caspian extremely dangerous on Monday. In the same days, the first cargo to move under electronic TIR across three countries crossed that water from Baku to Turkmenbashi.
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.
Russia puts a price on the migrant family
The law Putin signed on 26 July ties the right to work to an income test measured per dependant, and charges a fixed monthly tax for each of them. Most of it starts on 1 January 2027.
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.
Kabul and Tashkent sign 22 documents worth $200 million
This morning the desk asked which goods would appear when the paperwork did. Cotton appeared first, at 10,000 tonnes on trial with an offer for 100,000 more.