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Azeri Light clears $127 after Houthi strikes shut Saudi Arabia's Hormuz bypass; Baku's budget is written at $65
Trend's Tuesday print put Azeri Light at $127.29 a barrel CIF Augusta, up $7.27 on Friday's print, with Dated Brent at $129.28 after a rise of $10.72. The trigger is outside the region: Saudi Arabia suspended its East-West pipeline after drone attacks, and Monday's talks between Gulf states and Iran on passage through the Strait of Hormuz were cancelled. Baku's 2026 budget assumes $65 a barrel; Astana's, $60.
Tokayev tells Korean business he will turn Kazakhstan into one big construction site; Ashgabat's state site has yet to post its own president's 13 documents
At a Kazakh-Korean roundtable in Seoul on Tuesday Tokayev put the joint project portfolio at 51 projects worth over $4 billion and invited Korean companies into hospitals, schools, sports facilities and transport. His talks with President Lee were still ahead at this edition; hours after 13 documents were signed at Serdar Berdimuhamedov's summit with Lee, Turkmenistan's state site had posted at least 10 items for the day and none on the summit.
Kazakhstan gets the maximum 8% weight in JPMorgan's new frontier bond index, due by the end of September
A JPMorgan note to investors seen by Reuters puts Kazakhstan among 4 countries at the 8% cap in GBI-EM Edge, a local-currency index of 26 frontier markets and about $330 billion of debt that launches by the end of the month. No comment from Astana has surfaced; the tenge closed Monday at 447.8 to the dollar.
Fidan arrives in Baku with a $15 billion trade target and a summit to prepare; Ankara's index reached No: 180 without a word on the tug strike that killed 2 Azerbaijanis
Turkey's foreign ministry announced the visit of 15 and 16 September in one sentence on Monday. Hürriyet Daily News listed the meetings, with Jeyhun Bayramov, defence minister Zakir Hasanov and Ilham Aliyev, and the agenda: the trade target both presidents set, energy and transport projects, the defence industry, and the Organization of Turkic States summit Ankara hosts on 29 and 30 October.
Beijing's Silk Road Fund signs a financing agreement of up to $395 million with Uzbekistan's state bank for toll expressways, in the week the bank joined China's payment rail
The National Bank for Foreign Economic Activity signed the agreement in Hong Kong during prime minister Abdulla Aripov's visit to the Belt and Road summit on 9 and 10 September and disclosed it on Sunday. The priority named is modern toll expressways; the one Hong Kong's Belt and Road office calls its priority, Tashkent-Samarkand, broke ground on 22 August at a cost of $2.2 billion.
Kazakhstan's oil output fell 8.4% in 8 months, and the economy grew 4.1% anyway
The government's growth headquarters put January to August production at 61.7 million tonnes on Monday, against a 96 million plan for the year. Manufacturing, building sites and freight carried a growth figure that has held for 3 months.
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.
A drone hits a Turkish-flagged Ro-Ro on the Novorossiysk run; Ankara’s press index is still on Syria
The Lionfish, a 139-metre container and Ro-Ro ship built in 1997, under the Turkish flag and operated by Istanbul’s Feeder Link Denizcilik, was hit by a drone in the Black Sea, the Chamber of Shipping’s records showed early on Sunday, Haber Denizde reported; a container caught fire and was put out, no one was hurt, and the ship carried on to Trabzon. The chamber’s record had her sailing from Ambarli to Novorossiysk, the port that ships most of Kazakhstan’s oil; DenizHaber’s account on Sunday afternoon had the voyage as Ambarli to Trabzon, one Turkish port to another, and left the question of who fired open.
Armenia’s Russian gas stops for 11 days from Tuesday; Gazprom Armenia says Iranian volumes and storage cover it
Gazprom Armenia said on Monday that deliveries of Russian gas will be suspended from 15 to 25 September for planned preventive and overhaul work on the section of the North Caucasus-South Caucasus pipeline inside Russia, and that consumers will be supplied ‘without restrictions’ from internal reserves and additional volumes from Iran. The same day the State Revenue Committee reported that its chairman, Eduard Hakobyan, had signed in Iran with Iran’s customs chief Foroud Asgari a protocol on exchanging advance data on goods and vehicles, the ‘simplified customs corridor’, and the sides agreed to extend the joint use of the Meghri-Nordooz crossing.
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.
Dushanbe pencils in 1.55 million tonnes of imported fuel for 2027 at $1.12 billion, with the neighbours supplying 34,000 tonnes in July
Tajikistan’s forecast for 2027 puts petroleum-product imports at 1.55 million tonnes, 7.8% more than this year and about $1.12 billion, Asia-Plus reported on Saturday. In the first half of 2026, 91.1% of the 599,500 tonnes imported came from Russia under a 2013 agreement that carries no export duty, and the summer’s turn to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan reached about 34,000 tonnes in July.
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.
Drones reach the Nizhnekamsk refineries as Trump tells Kyiv to leave Russia’s diesel alone
A drone attack on Nizhnekamsk, the Tatarstan town whose industrial zone holds the TANECO and TAIF-NK refineries, killed 2 people and injured 14 early on Sunday, and by evening the US president was telling reporters in Ireland that Volodymyr Zelensky “has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia”. Sixteen days remain of the ban that keeps Russian producers’ diesel at home.
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.
Russia keeps its pumps on Euro-2 to June 2027 while its export bans hold, Novak tells the government
Deputy prime minister Alexander Novak has reported the state of the fuel market to a government subcommission chaired by first deputy prime minister Denis Manturov, Kommersant reported on Thursday evening: exports of petrol, diesel and jet fuel are banned, the Tax Code has been amended to create the conditions for fuel imports, and filling stations may sell fuel of ecological classes K2, K3 and K4, Euro-2 to Euro-4, under a temporary permit. The permit rests on a government resolution reported on 31 August and runs from 1 September to 30 June 2027. The bans are the ones already on record, and the producers' diesel ban ends on 30 September.
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.
Azerbaijan's state bank pays $140 million for 51% of Davr Bank, 40% above the price it announced in May
The International Bank of Azerbaijan bought 51% of Tashkent's Davr Bank on Thursday in 6 trades on the Tashkent stock exchange for 1.646 trillion soums, $139.5 million at Gazeta.uz's conversion. In May the price was given as more than $100 million. Neither report explains the difference.