Our People > Dr. Robert M. Cutler

Dr. Robert M. Cutler

Senior Editor and Contributor

Robert M. Cutler has written and consulted on Central Asian affairs for over 30 years at all levels. He was a founding member of the Central Eurasian Studies Society’s executive board and founding editor of its Perspectives publication. He has written for Asia Times, Foreign Policy Magazine, The National Interest, Euractiv, Radio Free Europe, National Post (Toronto), FSU Oil & Gas Monitor, and many other outlets.

He directs the NATO Association of Canada’s Energy Security Program, where he is also senior fellow, and is a practitioner member at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Complexity and Innovation. Educated at MIT, the Graduate Institute of International Studies (Geneva), and the University of Michigan, he was for many years a senior researcher at Carleton University’s Institute of European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, and is past chairman of the Montreal Press Club’s Board of Directors.

Articles

Middle Corridor

Central Asia and Azerbaijan Extend Cooperation Across the Caspian

Central Asia’s presidential forum now spans both shores of the Caspian. Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan anchor the principal Caspian crossing at the center of the Middle Corridor, the rail-and-sea network linking Central Asia to European markets through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Türkiye. Azerbaijan’s full participation brings the corridor’s eastern and western Caspian gateways into the same regular political setting. The six governments can use it to coordinate the transport, energy, digital, and investment links already developing across the Caspian, even though Georgia and Türkiye remain essential to the route’s westward operation. On July 31, 2026, the presidents of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan signed the Cholpon-Ata Declaration at an informal Consultative Meeting of the Heads of State of Central Asia and Azerbaijan in Kyrgyzstan. The Declaration gave formal political expression to cooperation that had already been developing. Official accounts said the leaders emphasized expanded regional cooperation, including trade, transport and logistics, and energy. The full text has not been released, so those priorities come from official accounts rather than the declaration itself. Proposed by Uzbekistani President Shavkat Mirziyoyev in 2017 and first convened in Astana in March 2018, the Consultative Meetings brought together the five Central Asian states in an informal presidential format. They expanded in November 2025 with Azerbaijan’s admission as a full-fledged participant, while retaining their consultative character. Azerbaijan attended in 2023 and 2024 as a guest; Cholpon-Ata was its first informal meeting in the new capacity. Official documents continue to call the format “Central Asia and Azerbaijan.” C6 is analytical shorthand for the enlargement, not the name of a new bloc or formal organization. Azerbaijan’s admission follows several years of practical cooperation. At a ministerial meeting in Aktau on November 25, 2022, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Türkiye signed a 2022–2027 roadmap for the simultaneous elimination of bottlenecks and development of the Middle Corridor. At its 2023 Baku summit, the UN Special Programme for the Economies of Central Asia (SPECA) adopted a digitalization roadmap and established a multi-partner trust fund, followed by work on digital data exchange and port-to-port cooperation. The transport roadmap includes Georgia and Türkiye, while SPECA also includes Afghanistan; neither is institutionally identical to C6. The enlarged format gives the six governments a regular political setting in which to coordinate existing transport, digital, and investment mechanisms. The Trans-Caspian International Transport Route Association reports that freight through the seaports of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan reached 3.3 million tons in 2024, 20% above the 2023 level, while container traffic within the same scope rose 176% to 56,500 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU). Freight remains the principal basis of integration. Oil transit, prospective electricity links, and joint investment instruments are extending cooperation into adjacent sectors. Kazakhstan's use of the route for oil exports is also rising: according to KazMunayGas reports, Kazakhstani oil shipments from Aktau through the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan route increased by 34% to 1.4 million tons in 2024. At COP29 in Baku on November 13, 2024, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan signed a strategic-partnership agreement on producing and transmitting green energy,...

1 week ago

Caspian Pipeline Consortium

Black Sea Risks Elevate Azerbaijan and Turkey in Kazakhstan’s Export Strategy

Bloomberg reported on August 8 that the Turkish authorities were withholding or delaying transit permission for some vessels bound through the Dardanelles for Novorossiysk. Some applicants were reportedly told that permits were not being issued, while others faced additional review. The practice appeared selective: vessels bound for some other Black Sea destinations continued to transit, while some Ukraine-bound vessels were also reportedly affected. On August 9, however, Turkish officials told Reuters that shipping through the Turkish Straits was proceeding smoothly and described the actions as temporary security measures rather than an ongoing restriction. The reported restrictions followed a sharp increase in attacks on commercial shipping around the Black Sea, including Turkish-linked vessels near Novorossiysk. Turkey’s Foreign Ministry expressed concern after attacks on the Turkish-owned Yaşar and Nadezhda and called on Russia and Ukraine to ensure navigational safety. Novorossiysk is especially important for Kazakhstan, because the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) terminal there handles the overwhelming majority of its oil exports. Although the CPC pipeline itself remains operational, the episode showed how quickly traffic serving Kazakhstan’s principal oil-export outlet could face an additional constraint. The events shed light on an export strategy Kazakhstan began developing several years before the current problems. Tokayev’s July 2022 instructions addressed both oil-export diversification through the Trans-Caspian route and alternative transport chains for other cargo. In particular, he called for greater use of Kazakhstan’s Caspian ports and the development of alternative railway routes. Later that year, KazMunayGas (KMG) and SOCAR established a framework for moving Kazakhstani oil from Aktau across the Caspian Sea and onward through the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline, initially for up to 1.5 million tons annually. Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey also adopted a 2022–2027 roadmap to remove bottlenecks along the Middle Corridor. Kazakhstan continued to develop transport links with Russia and China as it expanded Trans-Caspian routes through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey. The strategy extended Kazakhstan’s longstanding geopolitical multi-vector policy, which balances relations with partners in multiple directions, into the geoeconomic sphere. Tokayev made the combination explicit in his 2023 State of the Nation address. Relations with Turkey had meanwhile been elevated to an enhanced strategic partnership in May 2022, including transport cooperation and the Baku–Tbilisi–Kars railway. Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan deepened their strategic and allied cooperation later that year, likewise emphasizing transport and logistics. Closer ties with Azerbaijan and Turkey widened Kazakhstan’s options without displacing established routes through Russia. The CPC pipeline remains so dominant in Kazakhstan’s oil exports that no other existing route approaches its present scale. Of the 78.7 million tons of oil that Kazakhstan exported in 2025, the Energy Ministry reported the volume moving through the CPC pipeline at 64.8 million tons (the CPC itself reported about 63 million tons), meaning that more than four-fifths of Kazakhstan’s exported oil depended on the CPC system. Kazakhstan moved only about 1.4 million tons through the Aktau–Baku–Ceyhan (ABC) route in 2024, and about 1.3 million tons in 2025. Diversification cannot at present mean replacing CPC. The Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline gives Kazakhstani oil a westbound egress...

1 week ago

Black Sea Tanker Attacks

Europe Must Defend the Distinction It Has Made Between Kazakhstani and Russian Oil

In the early hours of July 30, drones struck two tankers at the marine terminal of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) near Novorossiysk: the Nissos Sifnos while it was loading Tengizchevroil crude at Single Point Mooring 3, and the Marathi as it approached the terminal. Loading was temporarily suspended, although the pipeline remained operational. Neither vessel sank; no casualties or oil spill were reported. Earlier attacks in July had already interrupted CPC loading operations and prompted a formal protest from Kazakhstan. Astana said that an agreed mechanism for exchanging information about civilian vessels entering the Black Sea to load CPC oil had been disregarded. The recurrence was more important than the damage: it could alter commercial expectations and behavior. The pipeline is not the relevant analytical unit; the export chain is. It can remain operational even when the maritime egress of its oil to world markets has ceased to function. Once loading stops and terminal storage fills, CPC must restrict intake from Kazakhstan, transmitting the interruption backward through the system until producers reduce output. After two tankers bound for the CPC terminal were struck in January, Black Sea war-risk premiums rose from 0.6–0.8% to 1% of vessel value, while insurers shortened their review of terms from every 48 hours to every 24 hours. By July, vessels were avoiding the terminal on safety grounds even though no structural damage to it had been reported. Commercial use of CPC was thus impaired despite the integrity of its infrastructure. The concentration of Kazakhstan’s exports magnifies the effect. CPC carries approximately four-fifths of its oil exports, including production from Tengiz, Kashagan, and Karachaganak. The July interruption exposed the consequence: full terminal storage obliged CPC to halt intake, while the Kazakhstani government confirmed that producers had reduced output because of export constraints. The vulnerability reaches backward from maritime egress into production. Crude from Kazakhstan occupies a material place in the EU’s non-Russian import structure, giving Europe a direct interest in the matter. Kazakhstan supplied 11.5% of EU petroleum-oil imports in 2024 and 9.6% in the first quarter of 2026, ranking among the Union’s three largest suppliers in both periods. The EU’s sanctions architecture already recognizes that Kazakhstani oil passing through Russian territory does not thereby become Russian oil. Commission guidance treats CPC crude as originating in Kazakhstan when supported by certificates of origin or other documentation, notwithstanding unavoidable admixture with Russian oil. EU legislation also provides targeted derogations permitting goods, technology, and services required for the operation and maintenance of CPC infrastructure. The differentiated treatment is narrow: it attaches to the origin and documentation of the cargo, not indiscriminately to every vessel, facility, or transaction associated with CPC. Cargo, route, terminal, and vessel remain legally separable. The distinction became especially salient when the sanctioned Nelsa, which had carried Russian Urals crude, was attacked at the same terminal after vessels loading Kazakhstani crude had been struck. Europe nevertheless lacks a CPC-specific public-policy position on repeated disruption of the export chain carrying exempted crude, even though its...

3 weeks ago

Critical Minerals

Resources, Capacity, Connectivity: Kazakhstan and the Critical Minerals Nexus

Kazakhstan’s place in diversified critical mineral supply chains rests on an unusual combination: a broad resource base, an established mining and metallurgical sector, and transport infrastructure extending across Eurasia. The task is to make these assets work together. Their strategic value depends on converting resources into financeable projects, existing capacity into internationally qualified products, and geographic connectivity into contractually reliable delivery. Kazakhstan approaches this task with an established industrial base. The world’s leading uranium producer, it also has production or processing capabilities in chromite and ferroalloys, titanium sponge, copper, zinc, aluminum, beryllium, molybdenum, rhenium, and other strategic materials. Much of that base was established during the Soviet period and extends beyond mines and plants to freight rail and experienced technical personnel. These assets reduce the burden of greenfield development for projects able to use them economically. By joining the U.S.-led Pax Silica initiative in June 2026 as its first Central Asian participant, Kazakhstan brought these questions into a wider strategic setting. Pax Silica connects critical minerals and energy to an industrial agenda extending from semiconductor production to artificial-intelligence infrastructure. Membership creates an institutional opening for higher-value processing and technology cooperation. For Kazakhstan, the opportunity is to retain more value domestically through technology transfer, skilled employment, and a broader range of processed exports. From Resources to Financeable Projects Mineral abundance makes projects possible but not automatically bankable. Current drilling and internationally recognized resource statements must first establish the size, grade, and confidence level of the resource. Feasibility work must then show that it can be developed, and permits must authorize development. The project must still secure an off-taker and financing able to withstand commodity and construction risk. Predictable permitting and clear ownership help lenders assess risk. Traceability is important to lenders and buyers alike. Kazakhstan has begun to make its geological information more usable. More than 4.6 million primary geological records have been digitized. In 2025, the country also developed 20 projects for detailed 1:50,000 surveys covering 100,000 square kilometers; the government plans approximately $470 million in exploration spending during 2026–28. Digitization can open inherited records, but surveys and spending acquire commercial relevance only through completed fieldwork and usable results. Those results must then support economically recoverable reserves and financeable projects. Bankability also depends on the institutions through which capital is raised and transactions governed. The Kazakhstan Stock Exchange and Astana International Exchange give issuers access to investors. The Astana International Financial Centre operates under a legal framework based on common law and has a separate court. Parties may also agree to international arbitration. Kazatomprom’s initial public offering in London and Astana demonstrated access to global capital for a mature national producer. Glencore’s controlling stake in Kazzinc and production by Central Asia Metals at Kounrad since 2012 provide evidence of sustained foreign participation. Taken together, these cases show that Kazakhstan’s system can support substantial transactions and long-term partnerships. Still, each new venture must establish its own economics under commodity and construction risk. From Industrial Capacity to Qualified Products The OECD identifies...

4 weeks ago

Middle Corridor

Daines’s Tour Signals an Emerging U.S. Caspian Corridor Strategy

Senator Steve Daines’s July 7–9 visit to Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan brought three bilateral relationships into a single, compressed Caspian itinerary. In Baku, he met President Ilham Aliyev and senior economic and foreign-policy officials; in Astana, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and representatives of government and business; and in Ashgabat, President Serdar Berdimuhamedov, Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov, and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov. Although official accounts treated each stop separately, the sequence suggests a regional pattern whose significance exceeds any single announcement. Daines had already supplied the clearest public articulation of the governing logic in his June 11 speech to the Caspian Policy Center’s Trans-Caspian Forum. There he joined Central Asia and the South Caucasus in a discussion about westward connectivity, investment, and supply-chain diversification. Daines identified critical minerals, energy, telecommunications, and physical and digital infrastructure as fields for public and private investment, while calling for TRIPP, a Caspian gas interconnector, and a continuous route from Central Asia to Western markets that avoids Russia and Iran. Together, these sectors give the proposed route both commercial and strategic content, though not the form of a single named program. Read against the June speech, Daines’s itinerary marks an emerging corridor-centered effort aligned with the Trump administration’s broader Caspian engagement, even without a formal declaration of purpose. Azerbaijan Anchors the Corridor’s Western Connections Baku gives the corridor logic its strongest institutional and bilateral footing. Aliyev and Daines discussed Azerbaijan’s geopolitical role, regional peace, and TRIPP’s importance for transport connectivity. Separate meetings with Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov and Economy Minister Mikayil Jabbarov extended the agenda to economic cooperation. With SOCAR President Rovshan Najaf, Jabbarov and Daines took up the Middle Corridor, energy, transport, digital development, and critical-mineral extraction and processing. Across the meetings, political, commercial, and technical portfolios converged around Azerbaijan’s place at the corridor’s western Caspian egress. The U.S.–Azerbaijan Strategic Partnership Charter, signed in February, places the Middle Corridor alongside energy, trade, transit, digital connectivity, and critical-mineral movement. It identifies Azerbaijan as an energy, transport, trade, and logistics hub for the Caspian region. Working groups regularize cooperation on trade, energy, connectivity, digital development, and security. The charter also calls for project lists and implementation roadmaps within three months of signing and for meetings at least once a year. In June, the first Azerbaijan-U.S. Economic Dialogue began translating that direction into an operational agenda. Government, financial institutions, and private-sector participants met on regional connectivity and transit, energy security, investment, artificial intelligence, and digital infrastructure. The agenda connected the Middle Corridor and TRIPP with logistics, the Southern Gas Corridor, critical mineral supply chains, transport and energy investment, and the Alat Free Economic Zone. Closing documents covered digital infrastructure, technology transfer, and industrial solutions. The workstreams are clear, but the consolidated project portfolio and its financing have yet to take public form. Azerbaijan’s role also rests on physical infrastructure already in use. The established Middle Corridor crosses Kazakhstan and the Caspian before passing through Azerbaijan and Georgia, then onward toward Türkiye or Europe via the Black Sea. At Alat, 70 kilometers...

1 month ago

Nuclear Diplomacy

Kazakhstan Offers the IAEA a Practical Option on Iran

On May 26, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev received IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi in Astana. The meeting pointed beyond bilateral nuclear cooperation toward Kazakhstan’s possible role in wider nuclear-security problems. Tokayev welcomed a roadmap for deepening Kazakhstan’s cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency through 2036, alongside documents on nuclear medicine and science. Grossi’s visit also followed Kazakhstan’s referendum on its first post-independence nuclear power plant, which has widened the civilian side of the country’s nuclear profile. Iran was not the subject around which the meeting was organized, but it is the issue that gives the meeting strategic weight. In particular, Kazakhstan’s established IAEA relationship could help give nuclear diplomacy a practical form if political agreement first creates a need for technical implementation. The potential is real, but it is narrow. Any political resolution of the Iran nuclear issue turns on decisions by Tehran, Washington, Israel, regional states, and the IAEA. The parties must first agree politically on an IAEA-led arrangement for Kazakhstan to enter the scene. Tokayev’s own formulation was appropriately limited: Kazakhstan’s assistance would be a gesture of good faith, and only if appropriate international agreements exist. Its involvement would come after the political bargain, not before it. Kazakhstan’s nuclear profile begins with the Soviet nuclear testing site at Semipalatinsk, which made nuclear policy a shared public memory before it became a diplomatic profile. Between 1949 and 1989, this site became one of the central locations of the Soviet nuclear-weapons program. The Nevada–Semipalatinsk movement, founded in 1989 by Olzhas Suleimenov, turned public opposition to testing into a political force before the site was closed in August 1991. Kazakhstan’s nuclear policy still expresses a public memory of Soviet testing and its public-health consequences. That memory does not make Kazakhstani society simply anti-nuclear, but it means that the country's nuclear policy carries a sensitive history. From the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan inherited on its territory one of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals. That arsenal included strategic nuclear warheads associated with intercontinental missiles and long-range bombers. Kazakhstan did not merely surrender an arsenal; it made renunciation part of its international profile. The country chose non-nuclear status, transferred the weapons to Russia, and joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a non-nuclear-weapon state. This renunciation gave political restraint an institutional form and gave Kazakhstan a special status in nuclear affairs. That standing has also appeared in earlier Iran-related diplomacy. Kazakhstan hosted two rounds of P5+1 nuclear talks with Iran in Almaty in 2013, and in 2015 Kazatomprom supplied Iran with 60 metric tons of natural uranium as part of the internationally coordinated implementation of the JCPOA. That standing now operates most clearly through Kazakhstan’s long cooperation with the IAEA. The Tokayev-Grossi meeting and the 2026–2036 cooperation roadmap make Kazakhstan’s nuclear development part of a continuing institutional relationship. Grossi’s visit also included agreements on nuclear science, healthcare delivery, and agricultural applications under IAEA programs. Tokayev and Grossi are not improvising a political solution to Iran; they are strengthening an institutional channel through...

3 months ago

National Identity

Kazakhstan Reclaims the Golden Horde

Kazakhstan’s symposium on the Golden Horde opens, in formal institutional terms, the question of where the country locates its statehood. Held in Astana on May 19–20 under UNESCO patronage, it brought together more than 300 scholars and experts, including 120 foreign researchers from more than 20 countries. Its title was “The Golden Horde as a Model of Steppe Civilization,” with history, archaeology, culture, and identity named as focal points of inquiry. The initiative places Kazakhstan’s history outside the narrow frame of post-Soviet chronology, treating the medieval past as a problem in the formation of Central Eurasia. Kazakhstan’s turn to the Golden Horde is not a decorative appeal to the medieval past, but a claim about statehood. It seeks to place Kazakhstan’s sovereignty within older Eurasian traditions of exchange, law, political authority, and movement across the steppe. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has put the claim in explicit form. In 2024, he described Kazakhstan as a successor to the nomadic civilization of the Great Steppe and called the Ulus of Jochi, known internationally as the Golden Horde, a pinnacle of state-building in Central Eurasia. At the Astana symposium, he returned to the same line, presenting the Golden Horde as an empire connecting East and West and influencing the development of civilizations and states. The point is not identitarian but genealogical: the recovery of a statehood tradition, not the retroactive conversion of a medieval formation into the present-day republic. The Golden Horde’s significance is as a political form whose relevance lies in rule, exchange, law, and mobility: this is where steppe history becomes state history. The symposium’s official framing emphasized the political, economic, cultural, and spiritual heritage of the Ulus of Jochi. Its final resolution was more specific, identifying the Golden Horde’s role in political traditions, international trade and diplomacy, legal institutions, numismatics, craft production, and the interaction of nomadic and urban societies. The Golden Horde thereby moves out of the narrow category of conquest and into the practical grammar of political and social order: administration, circulation, law, and exchange. The inherited Russian imperial and Soviet frame did not simply neglect the Golden Horde; it organized the question from outside Kazakhstan’s own statehood. A recent study in Nationalities Papers identifies a Soviet paradigm in which the Golden Horde was treated as foreign, destructive, and external to the emergence of the Kazakh Khanate, while the Ak Orda was favored as the more acceptable predecessor. This view did not disappear with independence. Under Nursultan Nazarbayev, the Golden Horde remained comparatively marginal in official historical narrative, even as Kazakhstan celebrated the Kazakh Khanate and the broader nomadic past. Ideological categories narrowed the possible interpretations of the past. The issue today is not reinvention but reordering. Presidential declarations provide the catalyst, not the machinery. The machinery is supplied by historians, institutes, universities, and conferences. The Nationalities Papers study describes historians as memory actors helping to move the Golden Horde from contested or marginal status toward official endorsement. It also identifies a dispute between older and newer schools of...

3 months ago

GDP

Why Kazakhstan Is Moving Ahead in GDP Per Capita

The International Monetary Fund has projected Kazakhstan to reach roughly $23,170 in nominal GDP per capita by 2031. On the same current-dollar measure, it is projected to pass China around 2026 and Russia by 2031. The comparison is a milestone, but it requires perspective. It is neither a purchasing-power verdict nor a comprehensive measure of household welfare. It nevertheless marks Kazakhstan’s entry into a higher income band. The question is how a state that began independence amid post-Soviet economic disruption reached this stage. How Kazakhstan Reached This Point Kazakhstan’s present position rests on a three-decade progression of state capacity, resource development, and institutional learning. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the country did not inherit a working growth model. It inherited broken production chains, institutional rupture, and inflation. It therefore faced the task of building a market economy out of an administrative-command system. In current U.S. dollars, GDP per capita stood near $1,400 in 1991, and exceeded $14,000 by 2024; in constant-dollar terms, the gain was smaller but still substantial. Hydrocarbons supplied the base, but political institutions and leadership acumen determined how much of that base could survive volatility. The path since 1991 has not been smooth. The 1990s brought collapse and stabilization. The 2000s brought hydrocarbon acceleration, foreign direct investment, and a rise in nominal GDP per capita climbing from a little more than $1,000 in 2000 to more than $8,000 in 2008. The global financial crisis interrupted the rise without destroying the model. The early 2010s brought recovery. The 2014–2016 oil-price and exchange-rate shock then tested the foundations already built, as the current-dollar figure fell sharply while real output per person proved more stable. COVID imposed another interruption. The post-2020 rebound belongs to that sequence. The Tokayev agenda belongs to this third stage of institutional learning. It did not create the GDP per capita trajectory over three decades, but today the issue has shifted from accumulation to stewardship. The inherited growth model had to be made more competitive, more rules-based, more socially visible, and more sustainable. Since 2022, the government has treated de-monopolization, asset recovery, social investment, and private-sector development as connected elements of the same governing effort. The IMF’s latest assessment shows the pressure inside that effort: growth remains strong, supported by oil output and non-oil activity, while fiscal, inflationary, and quasi-state-sector pressures still require correction. The Reform Program and Its Results Decree No. 542, signed in May 2024, set out measures to liberalize the economy, limit expansion of the quasi-state sector, revise privatization criteria, strengthen competition, and improve conditions for entrepreneurship. Its operative terms are competition, privatization, reduced state participation, and lower business costs. The decree temporarily halts the creation of new quasi-state entities and provides for an audit of state and quasi-state assets, partly to identify candidates for privatization. It also incorporates reforms affecting procurement and business regulation. The decree seeks to bend Kazakhstan’s accumulated macroeconomic trajectory toward commercial governance. The challenge is not to remove state capacity but to prevent it from crowding out private...

3 months ago

Critical Minerals

Central Asia Enters the Minerals Race

Central Asia is entering the critical minerals race at a time when deposits alone no longer confer strategic advantage. The Astana Mining & Metallurgy Congress, scheduled for June 11–12 at Hilton Astana, gives the issue operational form: supply chains, investment, and commercial projects. U.S. Under Secretary Jacob Helberg will participate there and in the preceding C5+1 Critical Minerals Dialogue on June 10–11. The Astana agenda also puts Central Asia’s role in global supply chains directly into view. The test is how quickly governments, investors, and industrial buyers can finance, process, move, and purchase minerals before they are locked into industrial supply chains. The G7 is moving in the same direction, but through institutional design rather than industrial action. The group is discussing a permanent critical minerals secretariat to maintain continuity across changing G7 presidencies, possibly at either the International Energy Agency or the OECD. The proposal acknowledges a real deficiency in Western coordination, but it also reveals the larger problem: continuity is useful only if it becomes execution. At the same time, reports have circulated about disagreements over stockpiling and leadership, including European resistance to both a single shared stockpile and a U.S.-led structure. For Central Asia, the practical question is not institutional architecture alone, but whether such coordination produces finance, processing capacity, and long-term offtake. The June dialogue in Astana is part of a wider C5+1 movement from diplomacy toward operational cooperation. Its participants are trying to convert the platform from a talk shop into a vehicle for business transactions. As TCA has reported, U.S. engagement in the region is increasingly tied to business mechanisms, export-credit support, and project finance. Kazakhstan has already moved into this framework track. Kazakhstan and the United States signed a memorandum of understanding on critical minerals cooperation during Tokayev’s November 2025 visit to Washington, and the agreement took immediate shape through the Tau-Ken Samruk–Cove Capital tungsten project. Kazakhstan’s Foreign Ministry later described the MOU as the first agreement of its kind in Central Asia, providing for processing capacity in Kazakhstan, technology transfer, and expanded access for Kazakh products to the U.S. market. In February 2026, Uzbekistan followed with its own U.S. critical minerals track: TCA reported that Tashkent signed a critical minerals MOU on February 4, and that DFC heads of terms for a Joint Investment Framework followed on February 19. Central Asian governments are not passive terrain for outside competition. Kazakhstan, with Central Asia’s most developed mining and metallurgical base, and Uzbekistan, with a rapidly expanding minerals program, are using minerals competition to attract capital and build processing capacity. They are seeking to diversify partners and move beyond dependence on raw material exports. The regional objective is industrial upgrading while preserving room for maneuver between China, Russia, the United States, Europe, and other partners. The minerals question cannot be separated from the larger Eurasian setting. Central Asia is trying to widen its own field of choice before its options are narrowed by what Hudson Institute senior fellow Ken Moriyasu called, in comments to...

3 months ago

Nuclear Energy

Kazakhstan Recasts Its Nuclear Past

At the United Nations in late April, Robert Floyd, executive secretary of the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, warned that any renewed nuclear test by Russia, the United States, or another state could draw other nuclear powers back into testing. His remarks followed the re-emergence of nuclear testing as an issue in international political debate. Kazakhstan enters this debate from the opposite side of nuclear history. It is a former Soviet nuclear test ground that now defines its nuclear policy through civilian power, peaceful use, and non-proliferation. Kazakhstan’s nuclear future is shaped by its nuclear past. The country was a Soviet nuclear test ground at Semipalatinsk, now Semey, where late-Soviet public-health concerns helped force nuclear testing into public politics before the site’s closure. After independence, Kazakhstan renounced the Soviet-era nuclear weapons it inherited on its territory. Its present nuclear-energy policy begins from that record. It is not a search for nuclear status, but a civilian program formed by restraint, public memory, and national development. Semipalatinsk is the source of Kazakhstan’s authority on nuclear testing. Between 1949 and 1989, the Soviet Union used the site as one of its principal nuclear testing grounds. In total, 456 nuclear tests were conducted there, including 340 underground and 116 atmospheric tests. Kazakhstan closed the site in 1991. These facts remove the subject from arms-control abstraction. For Kazakhstan, nuclear testing is a territorial, social, public-health, and political inheritance, bound to the eastern steppe and the communities around the former test range. Atomic Lake gives that history a single, physical form. In January 1965, the Soviet Union carried out the Chagan underground nuclear explosion at the Semipalatinsk Test Site. The blast, with a yield of 140 kilotons, was part of a Soviet program for using underground nuclear explosions in civil engineering, including reservoirs and channels in water-scarce regions. It created the crater later known as Atomic Lake. The site remains a physical residue of the Soviet claim that nuclear explosions could serve economic and social development. This is why nuclear technology in Kazakhstan cannot be politically neutral. Independence gave Kazakhstan agency in that history. Kazakhstan transferred Soviet-era nuclear weapons to Russia by April 1995 and took part in cooperative threat reduction, including the sealing of test-site boreholes and tunnels. More recently, it became host to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Low Enriched Uranium Bank at Ulba, in Oskemen. The bank is an IAEA-owned fuel-assurance reserve for peaceful nuclear power, designed to support access to nuclear fuel without encouraging additional enrichment programs. Kazakhstan’s civilian nuclear claim, therefore, rests on practice: disarmament, threat reduction, and non-proliferation infrastructure. The policy now turns on a practical paradox. Kazakhstan has been the world’s leading uranium producer since 2009 and produced about 40% of the world’s uranium in 2025. Yet it has no operating nuclear power plant. Its Soviet-era BN-350 reactor, near Aktau on the Caspian Sea, was decommissioned in 1999 after decades of electricity generation and desalination. Kazakhstan is central to the global nuclear fuel cycle but has...

4 months ago

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