On a visit to Astana on October 5, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced to the press in a conspicuously diplomatic tone that the United States had no intention of undermining Russian interests in Central Asia or drawing Kazakhstan into the American sphere of... MORE

Kazakhstan and Russia are in the final stages of planning large-scale training of their air defense forces. Shield-2008 will be held in western Kazakhstan as a joint air defense exercise, intended to deter “air raids and missile attacks” on either country. According to Abay Tasbulatov,... MORE

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev used the annual meeting of border regions of Kazakhstan and Russia in Aktobe (western Kazakhstan) on September 22 to confer with Kazak President Nursultan Nazarbayev, one of the Kremlin’s few remaining allies in its tense relations with the West. Both sides... MORE

Speaking at the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) summit in Moscow on September 5, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev went out of his way to show his country’s commitment to this heavily militarized organization, which unites four Central Asian countries, Armenia, and Belarus under the watchful... MORE

As leaders of Shanghai Cooperation Organization member states, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, China, and Russia, gathered in Dushanbe on August 29, the least thing that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev could count on was unanimous support for his recognition of the independence of the breakaway Georgian... MORE

In an unprecedented move, on July 1 Kazakh law enforcement authorities suspended the operation of the independent www.posit.kz website for three months. Confirming the harsh measure, Kazakh Deputy Prosecutor General Askhat Daulbayev said that the legal action had been taken after the website operators published... MORE

The volume reserved for Kazakhstan is intended to supply the southern and south-central parts of the country. To that end, under a separate project, KazTransGaz will lay a 1,510 kilometer pipeline, Beyneu-Akbulak, with a first-phase capacity of 5 billion cubic meters annually by mid-2011 and... MORE

Since 1991 Kazakhstan has pursued a multilayered foreign policy, juggling its evolving foreign initiatives from hydrocarbons to military cooperation with its former Communist master Russia through growing relationships with China and the United States. Now a fourth player is entering the market—Israel, not for Kazakhstan’s... MORE