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Joe Luc Barnes

Regional Editor and Journalist

Joe Luc Barnes is a British journalist and author who focuses on the countries of the former Soviet Union. He has a Master’s degree in Russian and East European Politics from the University of Oxford. His book, “Farewell to Russia: A Journey Through The Former USSR”, will be published by Elliott and Thompson in Spring 2026.

Articles

Automobile Industry

Chevrolet vs China: The Battle for the Future of Uzbekistan’s Auto Industry

ANDIJAN -- Spend long enough in Uzbekistan and you become adept at reading numberplates. While in Paris or Los Angeles, you will generally identify your taxi by its color and its manufacturer; try doing that in Uzbekistan, and you run into a problem: for the past two decades or so, the color and manufacturer have invariably been White and Chevrolet. “Yep, it’s true,” laughed Alisher, as I remarked on this when he collected me from Andijan train station. “90% of the cars are Chevrolets, and 80% of them are white.” But this era of monochrome monopoly may be coming to an end. With the electric vehicle (EV) revolution sweeping the world, Chinese companies have Chevrolet’s kingdom in their sights. A Levy for the Chevy Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan’s first president, was alone among the leaders of former Soviet republics in being a trained economist. Schooled in the planned economy, his powerful state acquired control over key industries and sought to make Uzbekistan self-reliant. It did a deal with South Korean conglomerate Daewoo to open its first factory in Uzbekistan in 1996, while slapping huge tariffs on all cars coming into the country from abroad. Daewoo, caught up in the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998, sold its auto arm to General Motors in 2002. The Detroit giant saw little wrong with the deal they had inherited in Uzbekistan, and so continued to produce Daewoo cars but now under their Chevrolet branding. The partnership transformed streets all across the country, with practically the only other cars to be seen on the roads being old Ladas from the Soviet period. [caption id="attachment_29761" align="aligncenter" width="1600"] A Kia hoarding above, naught but Chevrolet's below; image: Joe Luc Barnes[/caption] This lack of choice nevertheless provided jobs and an industrial base for the country’s auto industry. “I am very proud that Uzbekistan has built such an industry,” said Aziz Shukurov, CEO of A Group, a chain of car dealerships and owner of the nation’s largest network of service stations. “Today, more than one hundred companies operate in the local automotive industry producing parts for the vehicles; a lot of technology has been transferred over the years with tens of thousands of people employed. To my mind, a strong local automotive industry is a substantial asset for any country.” Meeting Mr. Market After Karimov died in 2016, his successor, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, began to embrace the free market. Close to a decade later, Tashkent throughfares are home to ever more foreign brands. Most prominent are South Korea’s Kia and Hyundai and China’s BYD and Changan. “The new president started opening up the country from 2017, giving access to foreign institutions and companies to the Uzbekistan market,” said Farkhodjon Israilov, an expert who specializes in attracting foreign investment into the country. In 2019, the government removed import duties and excise taxes on EVs. Given the growing popularity of EVs since then, the state-owned UzAuto Motors partnered with BYD to open one of only two operational production facilities outside China – the...

1 year ago

Ramadan

Fast Now, Feast Later: The Culinary Traditions of Ramadan in Uzbekistan

You hear the darkness before you see it. As the late winter sky pales over Tashkent, the noise of thousands of motorbike engines, bicycle bells, and apartment buzzers mounts to a crescendo. Those who haven’t ordered in battle their way past the onrushing delivery drivers towards the nearest restaurant. At Xadra, in the city’s Chilonzor district, tables fill rapidly. Dates, walnuts, sweetened milk, and bottles of water await their parched and starved customers. Many eye their watches carefully, waiting for the moment, at precisely 18.17, when they can begin to eat. Ramadan, or ramazon in Uzbek, is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar. From dawn until sunset, Muslims must refrain from eating, drinking, and other physical needs, only breaking their fast at sundown with a meal known as iftar. Though one might imagine a month of fasting would see a lull in activity across Tashkent’s catering sector, on the contrary, Ramadan is a month that is very much about food. [caption id="attachment_29505" align="aligncenter" width="1600"] Dates and milk are a traditional fast-breaking snack for starved stomachs; image: Joe Luc Barnes[/caption] The not-so-strict fast While the vast majority of the population are Muslim, Uzbekistan is a secular country, and there are no laws requiring restaurants or bars to close during daylight hours. Nevertheless, “cafes and restaurants are definitely less crowded; they’re at no more than 30 or 40% capacity during the daytime,” said Saodat Umarova, an economic analyst at the Center for Progressive Reforms. Shavkat, a kebab shop owner, observes a sharp decline in daytime custom. “I’m still open, but it’s certainly a more relaxed pace,” he said, pausing the film on his phone to talk to TCA. While a nearby university provides some business, his regular clients remain committed to their fasts. When asked if he finds it difficult being around food when he himself is fasting, Shavkat says that he does not mind. “On the first day or two, it is difficult, but you get used to it. This year is not such a difficult year.” He is referring to the season: in 2025, Ramadan began on March 1 and will end on March 30; the fasting period is a little over 12 hours, and the weather is mild. “When Ramadan falls in summer, you have long days, and it’s forty-degrees [104F], that’s when you really get tested.” Corporate accommodation The rhythm of business operations also shifts during the holy month. Oybek Shaykhov, Secretary General of the Uzbekistan-European Association for Economic Cooperation, tells TCA that while the economy doesn’t typically slow down, the nature of business meetings changes. “Breakfasts, lunches, and dinners are central to the business community, and during Ramadan, these gatherings shift towards Iftar, which is more of a group engagement rather than bilateral discussions,” he said. “Many companies try to ease workloads for employees, particularly if Ramadan falls during the hotter months, to accommodate fasting” Gulmira, a lawyer at a construction company, echoes this sentiment. “The only real difference is the lunch hour; everyone who is...

1 year ago

National Identity

Kyrgyzstan’s Rebrand: New Country, or New Distractions?

On January 29, in what became a viral social media post, Seide Ibraimova and her mother drove to the site of VDNKh, the exhibition center built in the Kirghiz SSR to demonstrate the achievements of socialist science and culture. Her mother, wrapped in a white headscarf, reminisced happily about the times she’d spent there, surrounded by poplar trees in the shadow of the mountains. Seide’s father was one of the architectural team who built the main pavilion in 1974. But as they arrived at the site, they found nothing but rubble. The government had bulldozed the pavilion to make way for a new congress hall. “How could they?” said the old lady in a choked whisper. “Your father gave his heart and soul to this, for the people of the republic. The number of delegations who came here… how could they?” In the post’s comments section, an intense debate began. Some lamented the loss of the exhibition center: “Without this historic architecture, Bishkek will be nothing more than a concrete jungle,” said one. Another invoked Chingiz Aitmatov’s famous mankurt metaphor, describing those who had destroyed the site as having “no sense of memory or feelings, without attachment, who do not know who they are or where they come from.” Others were less sentimental, pointing out that VDNKh had been left to rot for two decades, and that those venerating the Soviet relics were the real mankurts, “forgetting your language, preaching the history and ideology of the fascists who invaded and occupied our country.” “You can forget the USSR,” said another. “We live in a sovereign state, the Kyrgyz Republic!” These online spats come at a time when Kyrgyzstan is going through a form of national branding under the government of Sadyr Japarov. But is the country really shedding its Soviet skin, or are the changes mere window dressing? [caption id="attachment_29217" align="aligncenter" width="1600"] The ruins of the VDNKh pavilion, February 2025; image: Joe Luc Barnes[/caption] Around two hundred meters from the wreckage of the pavilion is Yntymak-Ordo, or the “new White House”. This is the newly-constructed official administrative building of Kyrgyzstan’s president – a squat structure with thick columns, topped by a glass dome and surrounded by iron bars and armed guards. Reminiscent of many of the other presidential palaces that have sprung up across Central Asia over the past thirty years, it is an assertion of power. Further along Chinghiz Aitmatov Avenue (which was called Prospekt Mira until 2015) are scores of new high-rise residential buildings. Each month, new approvals are granted for more of these in the city center, contributing to a construction boom. Some see this as a deliberate attempt to erase the Soviet past from the city and replace it with their own idea of a modern Kyrgyz capital. The aesthetic shift is not just architectural. The government recently launched a competition for a new Kyrgyz national anthem. Aspiring composers have been invited to submit their proposals, the commission recently confirming that 23 have been accepted so...

1 year ago

Oil and Gas

Right Place, Right Time: Central Asia Basks in Russia’s Eastern Energy Pivot

On January 1, with the closure of pipelines through Ukraine, deliveries of Russian gas to Europe came to a virtual standstill. Prices across the continent have ratcheted up in the first six weeks of 2025 and have now hit two-year highs. In Central Asia, the effects of the Russo-European decoupling have also been profound. In 2024, Kyrgyzstan posted a 48% year-on-year increase in Russian gas imports, while Uzbekistan’s inbound gas purchases soared over 142% to $1.68 billion. But while Gazprom’s reorientation has been a boon to Central Asia’s economies, this phenomenon appears to be more than short-term supply dumping due to the war in Ukraine. Rather, it is part of a lasting trend that could define the region’s, and the world’s, energy map. Russia’s Supply Glut In 2018, Russia exported a record 201 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas to Europe. The closure of the Yamal and Nord Stream pipelines had already brought these supplies down to 49.5 bcm by 2024 and will be further impacted by the cut in supplies via Ukraine. Despite some gas supplied via Turkstream and a steady trade in liquefied natural gas (LNG), Russian gas supplied to Europe is a fraction of what it once was. The Central Asian market offers both short and long-term solutions to this. “Most likely, Gazprom views its expansion into Central Asia as a partial and immediate solution to the challenge of finding new markets for its gas,” said Shaimerden Chikanayev, a partner at GRATA International, a law firm. “While the region cannot fully replace the volumes or profit margins previously achieved in Europe, it offers a readily accessible and stable outlet for Russian gas exports.” Central Asia is accessible due to old Soviet pipelines that link the region to Moscow. These pipelines, known as Central Asia–Center, were originally built to take gas from Turkmenistan, via Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to Russia. This system has now been engineered to run in reverse. The pipeline has a capacity of around 50 bcm per year, but there are ongoing efforts to increase it. Still, this is only a quarter of what was once supplied to Europe, nor are the revenues as lucrative. In 2023, the average rate charged by Gazprom to Uzbekistan for gas was $160 per thousand cubic meters (tcm), this compares to European prices that fluctuated between $200-400tcm throughout the 2010s. For Stanislav Pritchin, head of the Central Asia sector at the Institute for World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), Moscow, the price is not a major factor. “Russia of course sells gas to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan lower than the market price. This is a politically motivated decision. And this is not just because it is struggling with [selling to] Eastern Europe. Russia could sell it to Central Asia at market prices, but this is the Russian approach towards its allies in the region,” he said. Central Asian Serendipity For Central Asian states, these new supplies have come at a good time. Countries such as Kyrgyzstan are trying hard to...

1 year ago

Migrant Workers

Half a World Away: Central Asian Workers on British Farms

Few countries have more patriotic supermarkets than Britain. Whether it’s a sortie through the sausage section, or browsing the fruit aisle, customers are almost guaranteed to be confronted with the red, white and blue of the Union Jack. In a country not famed for its food, it’s perhaps strange to see the national flag given such prominence. The practice is far less common in continental Europe. Nevertheless, over the past decade there has been a push, propelled by an odd alliance of environmentalists and nationalists, to source homegrown food. Retailers have cottoned onto this and seem glad to leave the customer with the warm, bucolic feeling that they have aided embattled farmers, reduced their carbon footprint, and even helped to correct the country’s balance of payments deficit by buying British. “Supermarkets get more than just the profit margin for the [British] fruit they sell,” says Dr Lydia Medland, a research fellow at Bristol University. “We call it farmwashing: they get publicity, they get kudos; they use this ripe, fresh, local image to sell more products.” There’s only one snag. The people who pick the fruit and vegetables which are then packaged up with British flags, are not exactly local. [caption id="attachment_28497" align="aligncenter" width="1600"] British flags adorn food packaging in the country's supermarkets.Images: Yvonne Mould (left); Elke Morgan (center and right)[/caption] Central Asia and Britain: An Unlikely Match Seasonal workers have been traveling to the island of Britain for over a hundred years. In the nineteenth century, farmers would travel across the Irish Sea to help bring in the harvest. However, in the late 1990s, the number of people arriving on seasonal visas began to rise significantly. This was followed in the 2000s by a spike in workers from Europe, taking advantage of visa-free access to Britain’s labor market under the auspices of the European Union. They served as a pool of flexible, cheap workers for a farming industry that was being increasingly squeezed by the buying power of the country’s major supermarket chains. When Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016, the farming industry panicked at the prospect of losing much of this cut-price labor force. They successfully lobbied the government to relaunch the Seasonal Worker Visa program on a trial basis. Originally designed in the 1940s for European students, the scheme was repackaged to empower private recruitment agencies to hire workers from across the world to work in the fields for six months a year. When the visa debuted in 2018, 2,500 people came. By 2021 – the year that freedom of movement between Britain and the EU officially ended – the government had already raised the quota to 30,000. At the other end of Europe, the collapse in the value of the Russian Ruble since the start of 2023, combined with a crackdown on foreign laborers, has seen a mass exodus of Central Asians from Russia. By October 2024, there were around 30% fewer migrants in the country than there were on the eve of the Covid-19...

1 year ago

Bilateral Relations

Kyrgyzstan Raises First Sovereign Bond to Mitigate China’s Growing Influence

On February 4, Kyrgyz president Sadyr Japarov embarked on a four-day state visit to China, visiting Beijing and the northern city of Harbin for the opening ceremony of the 2025 Asian Winter Games. The visit comes against a backdrop of increasing engagement between Bishkek and Beijing. Temur Umarov, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, says that certain groups within the government are worried about an overreliance on China. “This is the problem of the current political leadership,” Umarov says. “They want to do more with China … they want to have more investment from China, but they have this debt that they inherited from the previous administrations.” Indeed, 36.7% of Kyrgyzstan’s foreign debt is now owed to the Export-Import Bank of China (Exim Bank), Beijing’s state-run lender which traditionally deals with foreign investments. China is also responsible for 46% of Kyrgyzstan’s foreign trade. With Russia hemorrhaging influence in the region amid its ongoing war in Ukraine, accessing new sources of investment has risen up the agenda in Bishkek. The Name’s Bond A key plank of these diversification attempts was put forward on January 13, when the Minister of Economy and Commerce, Bakyt Sydykov, announced plans to raise $1.7 billion through the sale of ten-year sovereign bonds in Hong Kong. “The country intends to tap into the international market for the first time,” Sydykov said. “We want to use Hong Kong’s role as a financial center to attract more potential investors, probably more diversified investors.” For Iskender Sharsheyev, an economist, this turn to the global markets cannot come soon enough. “This should have happened thirty years ago,” he says. Sharsheyev notes that the groundwork has been laid over the last few years, with ratings agency Moody’s reaffirming its B3 credit rating last year and projecting a “stable” outlook for the country. The yield of these bonds has yet to be announced, although Sharsheyev expects it to be reasonably high. “We expect that [the yield] will be worse for our country than for other countries, because, firstly, we are just entering. Secondly, the new flow of cash into the country could create risks; it can also spur inflation.” However, the high yield and the risk is seen as worth the cost. “The bond offering is an example of how Kyrgyzstan is trying to balance out its debt portfolio and have diversified ties with different creditors,” says Umarov. He notes that this mirrors a trend seen across Central Asia, where bonds have not traditionally been used as a means of fundraising but have become increasingly popular over recent years. In October 2024, Kazakhstan issued its first dollar-denominated Eurobond since 2015, the 10-year bond raising $1.5 billion with a yield of 4.714%. Sharsheyev believes that some of the proceeds of the bond sale will be used specifically to head off debts to Beijing. “China is the main [source of] pressure. To maintain sovereignty, we have begun to service the external debt. Our country has spent an average of $400-500 million on paying...

1 year ago

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