On November 23 in Ashgabat, Russian Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov and Gazprom president Alexei Miller held tense talks with Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimukhamedov on joint gas projects. The Russians goaded the Turkmens to open Caspian offshore blocks for Russian exploration and to start construction work... MORE

Last week, Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev again called for the reform of the country’s defense and security structures. On November 15, he ordered the various heads of the defense and security bodies to prepare detailed proposals for restructuring their agencies, as part of the ongoing... MORE

Moscow is lining up the member countries of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) -- Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan -- in a Russia-led bloc within the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. This bloc has emerged in the run-up to the... MORE

Almost all of Kyrgyzstan’s political parties that registered for the parliamentary elections on December 16 have now identified their top five candidates. Each political party had to come up with a list of 100 candidates for their official party lists. The top five slots tend... MORE

On November 5 Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev arrived in Damascus for a three-day visit. Both Nazarbayev and his Syrian counterpart, Bashar al-Assad, seemed satisfied with the talks, which covered investments, bilateral trade, and political ties. Beset by chronic economic and political troubles in the turbulent... MORE

Officially, Kazakhstan’s Ministry of the Interior (MVD) claims to have crushed the power of organized crime in the country. This assertion appears partly supported by the considerable reduction in the number of gangland killings since the 1990s. Nevertheless, Karavan newspaper reported on November 2 not... MORE

Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao recently concluded a whirlwind tour of Central Asia following the sixth Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit, held in Tashkent on November 2. While there, Wen met with Kazakhstan’s Prime Minister Karim Masimov. While no details of the meeting emerged, Wen... MORE

Three months after the arrests of three men in Germany, little is known about the network involved or the reasons behind a plot to use “massive bomb attacks” against targets in Germany. Reports immediately after the arrests pointed toward a U.S. airbase, nightclubs and the... MORE

On November 6 Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov announced his decision to enter the upcoming presidential elections on December 23. Karimov’s choice to seek another term provides a short-term solution to the fears of potentially ruthless competition for state power among local politicians and business elites.... MORE

Kazakhstan’s military cooperation with the NATO Alliance appears to be progressing steadily, despite the problems emerging between NATO and Russia. On October 31 Robert Simmons, NATO representative for Central Asia and South Caucasus, met Kazakhstan’s Defense Minister Daniyal Akhmetov in Astana. An official press release... MORE