Politics
Power and governance
Ashgabat signs 13 documents at the Blue House, from investment protection to the Karakum Canal; Rahmon is the last of 5 presidents to leave for Seoul
Serdar Berdimuhamedov's Tuesday meeting with Lee Jae-myung produced 13 agreements and memorandums, Seoul Economic Daily reported at 12:20 Seoul time, plus a thank-you from Lee for Turkmenistan's help in evacuating Koreans from Iran. Tokayev's turn is the afternoon. Tashkent's 13 from Monday now have contents.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Baku moves the start of work on the Trump route to 2027, 6 days before Armenia's court takes up the deal
Physical work on the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, the road and rail link across Armenia's south between Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan agreed in Washington in August 2025, will begin in 2027 instead of before the end of this year, Azerbaijan's foreign minister Jeyhun Bayramov told journalists on Wednesday, “according to the latest information”. Ilham Aliyev had put the start at the end of this year or the start of next; Nikol Pashinyan had wanted it in 2026. Armenia's Constitutional Court examines the agreement on 15 September.
Kyrgyzstan's parliament confirms Malik Bekturganov as prosecutor general a day before the appeal verdict on Tashiev
The Jogorku Kenesh approved Malik Bekturganov as prosecutor general on Wednesday morning, 24.kg reported at 10:53 Bishkek time. He has run the office as acting prosecutor general since June and was its first deputy from June 2024. On Thursday the Bishkek City Court is expected to rule on the appeals in the “letter 75” case, where his office is asking 9 years with confiscation for Kamchybek Tashiev and seven others.
The upstream no longer asks: what the Nile's war of nerves means for the Amu Darya
On 9 September the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam turns one and Tajikistan turns 35. The dates share a plot: a poor upstream state builds the largest thing it has ever built on a river the downstream lives by. Egypt answered with letters to the Security Council and got a year of arguments about floods. Uzbekistan answered with a railway, a gas valve and a decade of threats, then settled for a 20-year tariff with the World Bank's money behind the dam. On the Amu Darya's other bank a third builder has taken the Ethiopian script line for line, and there is no bank, no tariff and no treaty with which to buy it.
The Kremlin books Pashinyan for Moscow, and puts the referendum he dropped back on the agenda
Vladimir Putin invited Nikol Pashinyan to Moscow and Pashinyan accepted, Dmitry Peskov said on Monday; the two leaders, in his words, will discuss "the choice of the direction of development, Armenia's orientation" and "the holding of the corresponding referendum". A week earlier in Bishkek the Armenian prime minister had taken that referendum off his table. Moscow has now put it on its own, with no date attached.
Armenia sends the Catholicos back to Armavir, where he is charged with defying one court order
The Court of Cassation has ruled that the criminal case against Garegin II and six bishops belongs to the court of first instance of Armavir province, because the acts charged were committed at the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, Armenpress reported at 19:45 on Monday. The charge is a single article: part 2 of article 507 of the criminal code, obstructing the enforcement of a judicial act in force through the use of official powers. Behind it stands one bishop, Gevorg Saroyan, whom the Catholicos defrocked in January while a court order kept him in his post.
On the map in your pocket, Russia is 10 Central Asias. On the ground it is 4.3
The UN General Assembly voted on Friday to push the world's maps away from Mercator, for Africa's sake. CAW ran the same arithmetic across Eurasia: the standard web map hands Russia a latitude premium that doubles its visual weight against Central Asia, and hands Central Asia a premium of its own against every neighbour to its south and east. Correcting the map takes the northern half of that bargain away.
The pardoned Russian left Georgia for Yerevan the same evening the court gave him 7 days
Denis Kulanin flew out of Tbilisi on Friday evening and landed at Zvartnots, 8 days after President Mikheil Kavelashvili's pardon and hours after Tbilisi City Court granted the migration department's expulsion motion in a form that let him pick the country. The exit closes a thread that ran from a pardon through a dry hunger strike and a migration-centre cell to a courtroom, and it closes in Armenia, the destination on the ticket that expired while he sat in the centre on 1 September.
Kazakhstan's vice-president gets a decree of his own, and the Presidential Administration keeps the staff
On Saturday Kassym-Jomart Tokayev signed decree No. 1452 “On the powers of the Vice-President of the Republic of Kazakhstan”, the decree that says what Yerlan Karin does in the office he took on 31 August. It gives the vice-president strategic initiatives to draft, seven commissions and councils to run, the Secretariat of the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions to head and the KISI think tank to supervise. Everything outward, from the Kurultai to a foreign summit, he does “on the instruction of the President”, and his support comes from the Presidential Administration, where he served as first deputy head until his appointment.
A Tbilisi court gives the pardoned Russian 7 days to leave Georgia for a country of his choosing
Tbilisi City Court has granted the migration department's motion on Denis Kulanin in full, and the motion carried its own exit: seven days to leave voluntarily, to any country he picks, with a handover to Russia off the table, as Sova and Meduza read the ruling. The order had not reached the migration service by Friday afternoon, his lawyer said, and he stays in its temporary placement centre until it does.
A day after Tashkent's utilities cleared their own pipes, the city names a leaking gas main
Gas from a 219-millimetre underground main collected in a heating-network chamber under Glinka Street and blew out the asphalt on Thursday, Tashkent's city administration said on Friday. On Thursday the capital's heat, water and gas suppliers had all said the blast had nothing to do with their networks.
Tbilisi's file on a dead Abkhaz activist holds three detainees and two theories
Daur Buava, 30, who left Tkvarcheli for Tbilisi in 2021 and made TikTok videos about Abkhazia joining Georgia, was found dead in a rented flat in Didi Digomi on 27 August. A week on, the Interior Ministry's file holds three detainees and two articles of the criminal code, the drugs version the ministry gave on 29 August is disputed by his lawyer, and Wednesday's protest in Tbilisi carried the line “Daur was killed”.