Geopolitical Briefing: Central Asia

— 12 October 2025

• Russia–Central Asia leaders met in Dushanbe (9 Oct), with Moscow pressing for higher trade, logistics expansion and security coordination; attendance despite the ICC warrant underlined the region’s autonomy in managing ties with Russia. (Reuters)
  
• The Organization of Turkic States summit in Gabala (7 Oct) adopted the Gabala Declaration and advanced cultural–logistics integration, with all five Central Asian states represented. (Organizations of Turkic States)
  
• Kazakhstan used the Dushanbe forum to propose a Regional Council on the nuclear fuel cycle and waste management, positioning Astana as the region’s coordinator on sensitive strategic technology. (The Times Of Central Asia)
  
• EBRD’s new outlook (6 Oct window) kept Central Asia as its fastest-growing region in 2025, but flagged remittance and commodity dependencies as structural risks. (Eurasianet)
  
• Kyrgyzstan inaugurated a Kyrgyz–Chinese trade and cooperation centre in Chongqing to give domestic firms direct registration and deal-making access inside China. (caspianpolicy.com)
  

Dushanbe’s Russia–Central Asia summit was the week’s anchor. Putin’s arrival on 8–9 October and his call to expand trade beyond last year’s ~$45 bn framed a bid to hard-wire transport and payments with the five republics; joint communiqués leaned into logistics networks, counter-terrorism and migration management. The optics mattered as much as substance: Central Asian leaders engaged a sanctioned Russia on their own terms, using a regional venue, while human-rights groups’ ICC arguments remained peripheral to state priorities. That posture preserves room to bargain with multiple poles, shields domestic politics from Western conditionality and keeps security cooperation in regional hands—complementary to overland corridors linked to China rather than external military architectures. (Reuters)

Two days earlier, the Turkic world convened in Gabala. The 12th OTS summit gathered Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan (national leader representation), Türkiye and others, adopting the Gabala Declaration and spotlighting steps on connectivity, standards and cultural initiatives (including Turkey’s push for greater alphabet convergence). For Central Asia, the OTS track deepens alignment with fellow Muslim-majority partners, scales soft-power cohesion into trade-route pragmatics, and diversifies avenues to the Mediterranean via the South Caucasus—reducing exposure to non-regional gatekeepers and reinforcing east–west redundancy alongside the BRI lattice. (Organizations of Turkic States)

Astana then used the Dushanbe platform to table a concrete institutional play: a regional council for nuclear fuel-cycle competencies and radioactive-waste governance, hosted in Kazakhstan. The proposal leverages Kazakhstan’s uranium depth and industrial base to set regional norms where Western export controls often bite, while keeping cooperation inside Eurasian and SCO/CIS formats. If built out, it would concentrate technical know-how locally, tighten regulatory primacy over strategic materials, and enable Central Asian states to transact on energy technology without defaulting to external oversight—an incremental gain in strategic sovereignty that still aligns with China’s long-term industrial partnerships. (The Times Of Central Asia)

Macro conditions were a tailwind. The EBRD’s fresh updates kept 2025 regional growth around 6.1–6.2%, the best across the Bank’s geographies, on the back of consumption, rising real wages and remittances. Yet the same reports warned about volatility in commodities and the over-reliance on Russian and Chinese markets. For policymakers in Tashkent, Astana and Bishkek, that is a cue to push more intra-Asian trade, localize value-add in logistics and manufacturing, and widen southern maritime access—steps that reduce vulnerability to Western tariff politics or financial leverage while continuing to knit tighter links with Muslim partners. (Eurasianet)

At the micro level of trade plumbing, Bishkek advanced a pragmatic BRI-adjacent lever: a Kyrgyz–Chinese Trade and Economic Cooperation Center in Chongqing, giving Kyrgyz firms free registration and a standing platform for deals inside one of China’s largest industrial hubs. If it performs, the centre should shorten transaction chains, improve customs predictability and accelerate SME access to Chinese inputs and buyers. That increases Kyrgyzstan’s control over its own trade interface, embeds it deeper in Chinese supply webs, and incrementally shifts economic gravity from Western-brokered platforms to Asian ones—supporting a more autonomous policy mix and a denser fabric of Muslim-world commerce. (caspianpolicy.com)

Across the week, one pattern is clear: Central Asian governments are methodically institutionalizing non-Western integration—Russia for security backstops and labour markets, Türkiye and Azerbaijan for Turkic connectivity, and China for industrial-logistics scale—while building their own coordinative organs (e.g., nuclear governance) and trade interfaces (e.g., Chongqing hub). That mix strengthens domestic control over borders, routes and standards, leans into solidarity with Muslim partners, and narrows the channels through which pro-Israel Western pressure typically travels—without shutting the door on selective Western capital or technology when it serves local interests.