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Mirziyoyev offers business a 3-year truce
Uzbekistan signed a law of guarantees for business on Monday and spent Tuesday announcing the specifics: fines cut by half, a 3-year moratorium on most small-business inspections, energy prepayments down to 15%, and 10 days to fix a first offence. The guarantees are signed. The specifics, so far, are a speech.
Mongolia's fuel price outran the council that sets it
AI-92 petrol rose 200 tugriks a litre on Saturday, the weekend Ulaanbaatar’s rationing lapsed, while the Price Council that approves regulated prices has still not met. The crisis is changing shape: supply is recovering, and the cost is settling where it always ends, at the pump.
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 of 5 August. What it wants out of the fortnight is financing to extend water supply in the Gobi.
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.
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production number that takes in the crisis weeks, and it lands while the July numbers that would price them stay unpublished.
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.
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 to 2032 strategy framework with the Central Bank of Turkmenistan. President Serdar Berdimuhamedov received her the following day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Uzbekistan carves out a constitutional enclave for foreign capital
Mirziyoyev has signed the constitutional law on the Tashkent International Financial Center: a district of the capital where English common law applies, a court can seat foreign judges, the regulator’s acts outrank national legislation, and tax exemptions run to 2076. It is the region’s third English-law enclave, and the first anchored in a constitution’s own tier of law.
The Syr Darya treaty is now law in both capitals
Tokayev has signed the law ratifying Kazakhstan’s agreement with Uzbekistan on joint management of transboundary waters, completing a process Tashkent finished in March. The two states that share the river’s lower course now have a standing commission, and a basin that has run on annual improvisation gets its first permanent bilateral machine.
Kyrgyzstan answers 11.2% inflation with a one-year price freeze
President Japarov has signed a decree imposing a one-year moratorium on raising selected tariffs, fees and prices of state and municipal services. It is the third administrative price intervention this year, and it lands three days after the Asian Development Bank raised Kyrgyzstan’s 2026 inflation forecast to 11.2%.