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Novorossiysk halts its trains and its grain, and Kazakh oil keeps loading
Russian Railways closed loading toward the port for ten days on Thursday. One grain terminal stopped work the same day, another is repairing damage, and the harbour shuts twice today for live artillery practice. Kazakhstan’s crude leaves from a mooring fifteen kilometres west of all of it, and it is the one flow nobody has suspended.
Mongolia's ask at the summit it is paying to host is Gobi water
The national committee for COP17 met for the nineteenth time in Ulaanbaatar on Thursday morning, four days before the desertification conference opens. Mongolia has put 250 billion tugrik of state money into hosting it, about $70 million at the rate the desk logged on 5 August. What it wants out of the fortnight is financing to extend water supply in the Gobi.
The record rate to ship Kazakh oil is $440,948 a day
Daily earnings for a tanker running from Novorossiysk to Augusta reached $440,948 on Wednesday, the highest figure in a Baltic Exchange series that begins in July 2008. Washington's undertaking with Kyiv, three weeks old, covers the pipe and the terminal. The price is set somewhere else.
Kazakhstan’s oil route now rests on a phone call it was not part of
On 31 July, JD Vance asked Volodymyr Zelensky to stop striking the route Kazakhstan uses to sell most of its oil. Ukraine agreed not to target Caspian Pipeline Consortium infrastructure or non-Russian ships, and a US administration official has confirmed the warning. Last night’s attack on Novorossiysk, the heaviest of this crisis, was the first large test of that undertaking.
The corridor through Armenia acquires a second cargo
Ilham Aliyev says the project to run power lines to Nakhchivan across Armenian territory is ready, and that large electricity exports will follow. A route agreed as a road and a railway is being loaded, on one side's drawings, with a grid.
Moscow answers Armenia's trade complaint with a calendar
Nikol Pashinyan named the Russian import restrictions at the Eurasian Intergovernmental Council on Friday. Russia replied on Tuesday. The reply came from the foreign ministry, and it carried three dates.
Kazakhstan’s economy grows around its shrinking oil
Seven-month GDP growth of 4.1% arrived on Tuesday morning with a second number attached: oil output down 8.9% year on year, at 53.2 million tonnes. It is an official, national-perimeter production number that takes in the crisis weeks, and it lands while the July numbers that would price them stay unpublished.
Turkey reopens the straits without saying why it closed them
Tankers bound for Novorossiysk are moving again after a pause Ankara never explained and now calls a set of temporary measures. In Astana, the Energy Ministry put its detour list on the record on Monday.
Turkey pauses the straits, and Kazakh oil waits
From Thursday to Sunday, vessels bound for Novorossiysk could not get permits to transit the Turkish straits. The pause revealed a second gate on Kazakhstan’s main export route, and nobody in Astana holds the key.
Armenia brings the Russian import bans to the union's own table
Nikol Pashinyan told the four other governments of the Eurasian Economic Union on Friday that Russian restrictions on Armenian goods are feeding a negative view of the union inside Armenia. He came with figures: $319 million paid in during 2025, $175 million received back.
Fewer workers go to Russia, and the rubles they send buy less
Work-purpose entries to Russia from the region’s three biggest sending countries fell 15% in the first half of the year. From 1 September the workers who remain in Moscow will be registered through a phone app, and the ruble they are paid in has lost nearly 12% of its som value in five weeks.
July’s missing oil gets its first price tag
An energy commentator has put a dollar figure on Kazakhstan’s July production losses: more than $700 million of revenue in a single month. No official loss figure has surfaced, and the pipeline consortium has now said nothing in its own name for 8 days.
Chartering a tanker for the CPC terminal now costs $338,000 a day
The shipping market has repriced Kazakhstan's main export route. Daily charter rates for tankers calling at the Caspian Pipeline Consortium terminal have reached about $338,000, war-risk cover for calls at Black Sea terminals has climbed to as much as 2% of a vessel's value, and August-loading CPC Blend was offered this week at nearly $4 a barrel below Brent.
Mongolia zeroes its fuel taxes at the border
With rationing in force in Ulaanbaatar and 11 days to COP17, the cabinet has cancelled the excise on petrol and diesel and cut customs duties on every petroleum product to zero, giving up a revenue line to lower the cost of every imported litre.
Rationing meets high season in Mongolia
Mongolia’s tour guides went public on Wednesday with what fuel rationing is costing the strongest tourist season in four years. The UN’s desertification summit opens in Ulaanbaatar in 12 days.
The first count of July arrives from an unnamed source
Kazakhstan pumped 14% less oil a day in July than in June, the first month-scale measure of what the tanker war costs. The figure comes from an industry source through Reuters. The consortium that runs the route has still published nothing under its own name.
Bishkek prices the day the caps lapse
Kyrgyzstan’s cabinet chairman Adylbek Kasymaliev said on Tuesday that diesel could reach 130 to 140 som a litre and petrol 110 to 120. The caps in force run to 30 September: 93.9 for diesel, 79.9 for AI-92. The head of government has now priced what comes after them.
Ankara puts two names on the shipping war
Turkey’s foreign ministry on Tuesday named two Turkish-owned ships hit in a single evening off Novorossiysk and told the warring parties to make the Black Sea safe for civilian navigation. Kazakhstan’s export recovery now depends on how much of that warning the tanker market believes.
Pashinyan calls the union paralyzed
Armenia’s prime minister said on Thursday the Eurasian Economic Union is “de facto paralyzed”, his hardest wording since Russia began closing its market to Armenian goods in May. The union’s core promise, free movement of goods, is now disputed in public by one of its five members.
The fuel wall arrives, and the region answers with signatures
From Saturday, Russia’s gasoline export ban covers every exporter, and for August the diesel ban reaches even the producers. The decree leaves one door open, intergovernmental agreements, and the region spent the week queueing at it.