On May 11, 2021, in the Chinese city of Xi’an, a meeting was held between the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Kyrgyz Republic Ruslan Kazakbayev and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China Wang Yi. The Foreign Ministers discussed issues of trade and finance, as well as the implementation of…
Recent border clashes between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan claimed more than 40 lives, most of them civilians. Although the dispute may seem like another post-Soviet conflict over population and territory, it is also motivated by water control and drug trafficking. The skirmishes between April 28 and May 1 were the worst border clashes between the two Central…
The presidential campaign has started in Kyrgyzstan among candidates for the position of head of state, and elections for that are scheduled for January 10. The presidential elections will take place under very difficult economic and epidemiological conditions for this country, and against a backdrop of a plethora of events in 2020 – some of…
Over the past few years, the lion’s share of the countries in Central Asia (CA) have been undergoing a period involving social, economic, and political transformation. The region desperately needs to put transportation and social projects in place, create new jobs, industries, and energy facilities, and improve the quality of education and healthcare, all of…
An arc of instability has appeared on Russia’s peripheral regions to the west and southwest — Belarus, Nagorno-Karabakh and Kyrgyzstan. These regions are vital to Russia’s national security and weakens its capacity to be a resurgent power on the world stage. Belarus is a de facto buffer zone for Russia vis-a-vis the West. Russia…
Unlike fellow former Soviet Republics Belarus and even neighboring Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan’s latest elections didn’t result in any turmoil even though one might have expected it to have due to some similarly discernible risk factors, but that wasn’t the case (at least not yet) for five primary reasons. Tajikistan’s latest elections came and went without any…
