Increasingly, it seems that wherever one looks in Central Asia, Russia is losing ground. This retreat is not confined to economics, though it is certainly present in this sphere. Notably, Moscow is also finding it increasingly difficult to compete militarily in Central Asia. For example,... MORE

Mongolia’s national energy program has made significant progress in the past year. According to Energy Minister Dashzeveg Zorigt, in 2015, legislation regulating the energy sector was revised, electric power imports (one-fifth of energy comes from neighboring China and Russia) were significantly cut by $9 million,... MORE

Because Vladimir Putin has made the presence of ethnic Russians in other countries so central to his efforts to expand Moscow’s influence, their departure from any region or country means far more now than it did a decade ago. Nowhere has their exit been more... MORE

Since an uprising unseated the pro-Russian regime of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, relations between Kyiv and Moscow have gone from bad to worse. Responding to a recent ban of Ukrainian imports and seeking a way to reach post-Soviet Central Asian states and... MORE

On January 20, the official website of Kazakhstan’s presidency published Nursultan Nazarbayev’s address to the nation in which he announced snap parliamentary elections. Earlier, on January 13, the lower chamber of parliament, the Mazhilis, had made public a collective appeal to the head of state... MORE

In December 2015, Iran invited Tajikistan’s opposition leader, Muhiddin Kabiri, to attend a conference on Islam. The invitation extended to Kabiri, who is accused of allegedly masterminding an unsuccessful armed mutiny back home, unsettled the authorities in Dushanbe, which led to Tajikistan’s government summoning the... MORE

Until the close of 2015, Russia was the sole investor in two planned hydro-electric power projects in Kyrgyzstan: the Upper-Naryn cascade project and the Kambar-Ata-1 hydropower plant. The Upper Naryn project is estimated to cost $700 million and consists of four hydropower plants, while Kambarata-1,... MORE

With the global oil price dropping to below $40 per barrel and the tenge showing the worst performance among the world’s currencies in a year (Nur.kz, December 19, 2015), Kazakhstan is hastily adjusting to the dramatic change in market conditions by returning to more liberal... MORE

Neither Turkmenistan, which has maintained a policy of strict neutrality since the 1990s, nor Tajikistan, which hosts a Russian military base on its territory, has a military force capable of resisting incursions by the Islamic State (IS), the Taliban or other militant forces emanating from... MORE

Looking ahead to 2016, Mongolia’s government publicized a series of major developments in its large state-owned mining projects of Oyu Tolgoi (OT) and Tavan Tolgoi (TT), which could pull the country’s battered economy out of its downward spiral of disappearing foreign direct investment (FDI) and... MORE