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The pipeline restarts after production halved

CPC began taking Kazakh crude again on Sunday evening. By then national output was running at about half its June average, roughly twice the drop that had been reported all week.

One littoral state speaks about the Caspian

Turkmenistan called the attack on a vessel in the Caspian inadmissible and named nobody at all. Kyiv answered Tehran the same day, and Baku and Tehran shut each other’s broadcasters.

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.

Tashkent sends a 300-strong business delegation to Kabul

Uzbekistan’s deputy prime minister spent the weekend in Kabul with a delegation and a tariff offer. The stated target is $5 billion of trade.

EcoIslamicBank goes on the EU list from 13 August

The 21st package names a Kyrgyz bank, three Bishkek companies and two Kazakh ones. Within a day, transfers from Russia to four countries stopped going through.

Kyrgyzstan rewrites its fuel subsidy for a wider border

Moscow will hold its gasoline export ban to the end of the year. Bishkek is redrafting its subsidy rules so that supported fuel can arrive at any crossing point, from any third country.

Kazakhstan moves from a fine to a seizure at Kashagan

Property and vehicles belonging to the Kashagan operator went under restriction on 21 July. The justice ministry has told the operator’s managing director he could face criminal liability.

A fifth of the country’s output, gone in a day

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.

Mongolia enters the EAEU tariff system

The interim trade agreement between the Eurasian Economic Union and Mongolia entered into force on 22 July. Duties are cut or removed on 367 tariff subheadings for each side, covering about 90% of the trade between them, for three years with automatic renewal. By the commission’s account, Mongolia has no comparable agreement with anyone else in the region.

Uzbekistan signs its own commercial court into law

President Mirziyoyev has signed the constitutional law on the Tashkent International Financial Centre, which takes effect on 25 July. It creates a special jurisdiction with its own regulation and its own court: the Tashkent International Commercial Court, with a first instance and an appeal chamber, for commercial, corporate and financial disputes inside the centre.

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.

Bishkek lines up fuel from four directions

At a briefing in Bishkek on 21 July the energy minister, Altynbek Rysbekov, named the sources now filling Kyrgyzstan’s tanks: a first consignment dispatched from China by road, Belarusian fuel already arriving by rail, Kazakh fuel oil at 15,000 to 20,000 tons a month, and a tolling arrangement with Uzbekistan. Russia still supplies more than 90% of Kyrgyzstan’s gasoline; in this particular list it appears as the corridor Belarusian fuel travels through.

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.

Moscow starts Uzbekistan up the produce ladder

Rosselkhoznadzor will restrict imports from five Uzbek exporters from 23 July, citing phytosanitary violations: cabbage, onions, herbs, beetroot, tomatoes and grapes. In May the same regulator suspended ten Uzbek exporters. Armenia climbed this ladder rung by rung this spring, to a full ban in June.

The first e-TIR truck heads for Turkmenistan

The first pilot shipment under the electronic TIR customs system between Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan began this week, the head of Azerbaijan’s road carriers association said: the cargo has already crossed from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan over the Caspian and moves on to Turkmenistan next.

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.