Politics
Power and governance
The region’s diplomacy moves to a Kyrgyz lakeshore
Shavkat Mirziyoyev departed for Kyrgyzstan on Thursday morning on a state visit that runs into a Central Asia–Azerbaijan summit at Cholpon-Ata from 30 July to 1 August. Ilham Aliyev arrives on a state visit of his own.
Washington picks up the phone on the CPC
Kazakhstan’s foreign minister Yermek Kosherbayev and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio discussed the crisis around the Caspian Pipeline Consortium by phone on 29 July. No earlier cabinet-level American engagement with the route’s security has surfaced in the wires since the drone attacks began on 17 July.
Moscow answers Yerevan through its foreign intelligence service
A day after Pashinyan asked Putin to lift the export restrictions, the Kremlin briefing dealt with an EU referendum and the Foreign Intelligence Service issued four statements on what leaving the Eurasian Economic Union would cost Armenia.
Xi Jinping comes to Bishkek for the summit days
China’s president will make a state visit to Kyrgyzstan on 31 August and 1 September, the days of the SCO summit. The file named first is the railway.
Tashkent sacks its energy minister, and four utilities go on probation
Jurabek Mirzamahmudov was released on Monday. Mirziyoyev located the failure in management of the system and gave the heads of four state energy companies until the end of the year.
Tokayev asks for a freeze in Omsk, and Moscow answers in a day
Standing beside Putin, Kazakhstan’s president proposed freezing the war and returning to the Istanbul terms. The Kremlin called a freeze impossible the following morning.
Kazakhstan takes the tanker attacks to the SCO table
Foreign minister Yermek Kosherbayev told the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s ministerial council on Friday that attacks on oil infrastructure threaten the durability of trade relations and supply chains. Astana has carried this month’s crisis onto a multilateral platform, into a room that includes Russia, China, India, Iran and Pakistan.
Bishkek gets the SCO summit, and five weeks to prepare
The organisation’s foreign ministers are meeting on Issyk-Kul through Friday to prepare a leaders’ summit already set for Bishkek on 31 August and 1 September, in the SCO’s twenty-fifth year. Kyrgyzstan will host the region’s heads of state a week after Kazakhstan votes for its first Kurultai and days after the UN desertification conference closes in Ulaanbaatar.
SCO foreign ministers meet on Issyk-Kul
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s council of foreign ministers convenes in Cholpon-Ata on 23 and 24 July, with Russia’s Sergei Lavrov and Belarus’s Maxim Ryzhenkov among those attending. Kyrgyzstan hosts it in the week neighbouring Kazakhstan lost a fifth of its oil production to drone strikes on an export route that runs through another member state’s territory.
Kyiv answers Astana by denying authorship
Ukraine’s ambassador to Kazakhstan, Viktor Maiko, said there is no evidence Ukrainian forces carried out the tanker attacks of 17, 19 and 20 July, asked Astana to refrain from hasty accusations, and raised the possibility of Russian provocations using Ukrainian drones. The statement, published in full by The Times of Central Asia on 21 July, is the first public answer from the Ukrainian side.
Tashkent audits $213 billion of promises
President Mirziyoyev dismissed Uzbekistan’s ambassador to Belarus this week for what the readout called an indifferent attitude to investment and foreign trade, and told the head of his administration, Saida Mirziyoyeva, to assess every mission’s economic diplomacy. His own accounting framed it: 52 top-level visits have produced agreements on 1,617 investment projects worth $213 billion.
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.
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.
Tajikistan and Mongolia sign twelve documents, minerals and glaciers included
After talks in Ulaanbaatar on 21 July, Emomali Rahmon and Ukhnaagiin Khurelsukh adopted a joint statement, and 11 further documents were signed in their presence. The list runs heavier than the trade between the two countries: two mining lines, a road-transport agreement, and a glacier-and-desertification memorandum four weeks before Ulaanbaatar hosts the UN’s desertification conference.
Rahmon returns to Ulaanbaatar after 17 years
Tajikistan’s president arrived in Mongolia on Monday for a state visit running to 22 July, his first since March 2009, returning last year’s first-ever trip by a Mongolian president to Dushanbe. The talks and the signing come on Tuesday, and the document list is the watch.
Tashkent changes the man who guards the president
By decree on 18 July, President Mirziyoyev appointed Rustam Juraev chairman of the State Security Service of the president and promoted him to lieutenant general. Alisher Usmanov, a career officer who shares his name with the Russian-Uzbek billionaire, was released from the post. The announcements gave no reason.
Tashiev rules himself out of 2027
Two weeks after a suspended sentence ended Kyrgyzstan’s ruling tandem, the former security chief said he will not run for president in 2027 and will back Sadyr Japarov, in a statement circulated on the evening of 16 July.
Rahmon rebuilds the deputy floor of the state
In a single day the Tajik president appointed new deputies at the National Bank, the energy and water ministry, transport, customs, the pensions agency and the state industrial-export bank, with digitalization written into their mandates. The ministers stayed in place; the floor beneath them was rebuilt.
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.
Kazakhstan’s new parliament costs $72 million before a single vote
The government has allocated 34.3 billion tenge, about $72 million, from its reserve fund to run the 23 August elections to the Kurultai, the single-chamber parliament created by the July constitution. It comes from the reserve because last year’s budget could not foresee the institution it is now paying for.