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Five Years Ahead: A sky bought for thirty years
Six Chinese fighters at Karshi-Khanabad commit Uzbekistan's air force to one supplier for the life of the airframe. The five-year question is what arrives with them: the missiles, the technicians, the software, the credit and the habit.
31 December, in dollars
Bishkek fixed its fuel wall at $960 a tonne of petrol until New Year's Eve and backdated it to August. In the first month behind it, petrol rose anyway. Here is what the resolution says, what the statistics say, and the document that would settle the difference.
The chamber that begins with children
A supermajority parliament's first announced act is a bill about minors. That choice is the most legible thing about it.
The queue with a warehouse address
Mongolia's regulator says part of August's fuel shortage sat in storage. Fifty years ago America asked the same question, and took eight years to stop asking.
Five Years Ahead: one ring, four sets of numbers
The August blackout found Central Asia's power ring rebuilt in copper and broken in bookkeeping. Which one gets fixed first will decide what the next fault costs.
The summit dated by everyone except its most important guest
Bishkek is closing ten shopping centres, three markets and four underpasses for the first days of September. Beijing has still not said that its president is coming.
The arithmetic of gratitude
On 15 August Ulaanbaatar's drivers stop queuing by their plate numbers and start driving by them. Peter Lidovsky on a city that has scheduled its relief and its restriction for the same morning.
Bishkek pays 86.90 som for petrol the state capped at 79.9
The state fixed a retail petrol price for the summer. By the end of July every surveyed station in Bishkek was above it.
A queue timed to end when the guests arrive
Ulaanbaatar rations petrol by number plate until 15 August. The UN’s desertification summit opens there on the 17th. The gap between those two dates is the most carefully planned thing in Mongolia this month.
Mongolia’s leverage lies in other people’s courtrooms
Shareholders in New York and Québec have twice put a price on the Oyu Tolgoi construction story. One settlement has been approved; the other awaits a hearing. Ulaanbaatar used that story once, in 2022, but has since left it in the drawer. A former government insider says it is time to take it out.
Five Years Ahead: the institution that refuses to exist
The region’s most productive political format keeps insisting it is only a conversation. The paper trail from Issyk-Kul says the conversation is becoming a structure.
Kazakhstan’s tungsten leaves before it matters
A metal the world has started to fight over, a pit that needs a slice of a national park to reach it, and a plant built to ship the ore out as concentrate.
Nowhere to put a bad week
The region has spent a decade building capacity to move things and almost nothing to hold them. July is showing what that costs.
The bill for Kashagan, and the line nobody publishes
Kazakhstan is collecting 2.3 trillion tenge from the operator of its largest offshore field, in the week that field’s export route shut down. The state has published the demand. It has not published the calculation behind it, and it has not said who ultimately carries the cost.
The middle position gets its invoice
Kazakhstan has monetized its distance from two wars since 2022. In four July days one of them priced that distance at the terminal through which more than 80% of its oil exports leave. The next document out of Astana will show whether the region has a policy for this, or only a posture.
Law by container
In two July weeks the region signed into Chinese mediation, kept its oil disputes in Geneva, and wrote English law behind two new fences, while Armenia holds a Stockholm order to be optional. The pattern is freight logistics, applied to jurisprudence.
Five Years Ahead: the region is retiring its most dangerous question
Three legal events in one July week, in three capitals, shared no category and one function: the retirement of the question of who comes next. The five-year bill goes to the institutions doing the retiring.
Bishkek's confession by conduct
Two state banks quietly dropped 131 clients this summer. The government called it the results of ongoing work. It never once called it what the European Union had been saying for months, and it never had to. The banks said it instead.
Five Years Ahead: the grid is Kazakhstan's real AI strategy
Astana is buying chips, signing frameworks and courting both Washington and Beijing on artificial intelligence. Almost none of that requires it to generate a single extra watt. Five years out, the constraint that decides how this ends runs through the grid.
Who gains from the UN's silence on Tajikistan
On 3 July the UN Human Rights Council closed a confidential complaint against Tajikistan without a word of explanation. Three days earlier the World Bank had approved another $400 million for the country. Read those two facts together, and the silence has an address.