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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.
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.
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.
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.
Kazakhstan starts moving oil around a closed route
With loading at the CPC terminal shut for a fifth day, Astana had begun redirecting exports to alternative routes and was assessing its losses, Kommersant reported on 20 July, while the consortium has gone to court against Ukraine over damage it values in billions of roubles. The energy ministry now frames the production cut as a technological necessity: with the terminal’s tanks full, companies trimmed daily volumes to stop the system overflowing.
Tengiz halves its output
Kazakhstan cut oil and gas condensate production on 22 July after export loadings stopped at the CPC terminal, Reuters reported, citing a source: daily output at Tengiz fell to 406,000 barrels from 925,000. The energy ministry confirmed a temporary reduction and said consultations are running with the consortium, shippers and shipowners.
Astana starts collecting $4.9 billion against an arbitral order
The voluntary deadline passed on 20 July, and Kazakhstan opened enforcement proceedings for a 2.3 trillion tenge environmental fine against NCOC, the Kashagan operator, the justice ministry said on the 21st; the tenge figure is the legal one, and dollar renderings of it run from $4.4 to $4.9 billion. A UNCITRAL tribunal had barred exactly that, as the consortium announced on 16 July. Reuters reports the state warned the consortium’s chief executive of administrative and criminal liability.
Novorossiysk stops taking Kazakh oil
The Caspian Pipeline Consortium has stopped accepting Kazakh crude and the terminal’s tanks are full, Reuters reported on Wednesday. Tracking data shows at least two tankers bound for the berths have changed course. There is a measured precedent for what follows: when the terminal was attacked last November, Reuters reported Kazakh output falling about 6% the following month.
The market answers first: charterers flee the CPC water
Foreign shipowners are refusing to send tankers to the CPC terminal after four tankers were hit in four days, Bloomberg reported, and the consortium was expected to stop accepting Kazakh pipeline crude on Tuesday. If intake stays shut into the weekend, Bloomberg’s sources say, Kazakhstan’s producers will have to cut output. The war has traveled the route’s full length, from the berths to the wellhead.
The heat breaks, and the bill arrives in mud
Bishkek logged 43.5 degrees on Sunday, its third daily record in a row, after the hottest 17 and 18 July in observation history; Uzbekistan’s grid ran five record days. From Tuesday both hydromets forecast the break, and both have posted mudflow warnings for the mountain belts, Kyrgyzstan’s through 25 July, Uzbekistan’s through the 24th. Summer in the region now alternates between two infrastructure tests, and there is no season between them.
Kazakhstan’s fuel wall takes comments for one more day
Public comment on the energy ministry’s draft order closes on Tuesday. The draft extends the ban on gasoline and diesel exports by road and rail from 22 November 2026 to 22 May 2027, keeps EAEU members inside it, and adds a separate half-year ban from January on jet kerosene, light distillates, gasoils, toluene, xylene and bitumen leaving the union’s customs territory.
The protest was answered by the next drone
Loading at the CPC terminal restarted on Sunday evening and stopped again on Monday morning, when a drone hit the tanker NELSA at the mooring where one of Sunday’s two tankers had burned. Twenty-two of the crew were taken off by CPC tugs. A day after Kazakhstan demanded the attacks end, the demand’s market price was set at zero.
The drones reached the tankers loading Kazakhstan’s oil
On 17 and 19 July drone strikes hit three tankers serving the Caspian Pipeline Consortium’s Black Sea terminal, two of them at the loading berths with Tengiz and Kashagan crude aboard. Loading stopped, and on Sunday Kazakhstan’s foreign ministry called the attacks an encroachment on the country’s economic interests, demanded they end and reserved the right to claim damages.
Turkmenistan negotiates its own terminal on the Black Sea
At a business forum in Georgia on 16 July, Serdar Berdimuhamedov said Ashgabat is in talks to establish a Turkmen cargo terminal on Georgia’s Black Sea coast. Add the Damen dredging talks at Turkmenbashi and the Baku transit spine, and the corridor’s quietest player is assembling positions at every gate between the Caspian and Europe.
Kazakhstan asks to host the founding of China's AI order
In Shanghai on 16 July, 29 states signed the agreement establishing the World AI Cooperation Organization. On the 17th, speaking at the WAIC opening, President Tokayev offered Astana for the body’s inaugural meeting and asked for its Central Asia office. Three weeks after joining the US-led Pax Silica bloc, Kazakhstan holds founding papers in both AI systems.
Shanghai hands Kazakhstan a $15 billion signing day
Tokayev’s administration says his working visit to China has produced more than 70 commercial agreements worth over $15 billion, signed in the course of a visit built around Thursday’s talks with Xi Jinping and a round table with the heads of Chinese companies. On Friday the president moves to the World AI Conference. The week now reads as a single Chinese arc: a legal convention on Monday, an order book on Thursday, algorithm governance to close.
The railway the premier called weak signs $400 million with China
A day after Bektenov’s "remains weak" landed on the cabinet record, Kazakhstan Temir Zholy announced a package of agreements signed with Chinese partners in Shanghai, worth about $400 million, part of it denominated in yuan. In the same days, Tokayev flew to Shanghai to meet Xi Jinping.
Kazakhstan switches on money that reports itself
On 18 July the digital tenge becomes legal tender in full circulation, and its defining feature is the mark: the law lets each digital tenge be tagged with a unique identifier, and every movement runs on the National Bank’s platform, so the state can trace the money it issues. Uzbekistan is fighting over whether banks must report large transfers. Kazakhstan has built a currency that makes the question obsolete.
Uzbekistan starts rolling the sheet steel it has always imported
On Monday Mirziyoyev pushed the button on an $839 million casting-and-rolling complex at Uzmetkombinat in Bekabad, the country’s first production of hot-rolled sheet. Two days later, in the middle of a +44 to +46 heat warning, the national grid set a consumption record. The steel week tells one story from both ends: Central Asia’s industrial ambitions are arriving faster than the systems meant to feed them.
A billion dollars keeps the som exactly where it is
Kyrgyzstan’s National Bank has intervened in the currency market nine times this year, always as a seller of dollars, and the disclosed operations alone sum past $1.1 billion. The official rate has sat at 87.45 to the dollar since at least mid-June. A rate that does not move in a month of 11% inflation is a defended line, and the defense is getting more expensive.