Kaja Kallas’s late-March 2025 tour of Central Asia, in her role as the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, was a high-signal intervention in structural terms. It indicates a major re-evaluation of the EU’s posture toward a region historically treated as a far-flung, liminal borderland. As the inaugural EU–Central Asia Summit in Samarkand on April 3–4 approaches, her visible diplomatic activity was less about spectacle than about configuring a new field of co-adaptive engagement. Not only the European Union but also, separately, the United Kingdom are both seeking new regional footholds for building durable alignments.
Central Asia, for decades considered through a lens of post-Soviet dependency or one of Chinese infrastructural absorption, is now increasingly recognized as a network node of emergent geopolitical agency. No longer just a space “between” other spaces, it is becoming a strategic space in its own right. Kallas’s mission and the UK’s parallel outreach signify a turn toward a negotiated interdependence that does not dissolve classical interest-based diplomacy but rather “complexifies” it by embedding it in a landscape of developmental trajectories and overlapping power centers.
The arc of Kallas’s visit traced a deliberate sequence: Ashgabat, Tashkent, Almaty, Bishkek. In Ashgabat, she chaired the 20th EU–Central Asia Ministerial Meeting, a session nominally bureaucratic but substantively strategic. Discussions reaffirmed the 2023 EU–Central Asia Roadmap and activated the Global Gateway as an organizing frame for infrastructural, digital, and energy cooperation. Bilateral exchanges with officials in Turkmenistan brought the sensitive issue of sanctions circumvention into the open: Turkmenistan, though nominally neutral, remains enmeshed in logistics corridors proximate to Russian interest.
From there, Kallas moved to Uzbekistan, where preparations for the April 3–4 Samarkand summit took clearer shape. Talks with President Shavkat Mirziyoyev and Foreign Minister Bakhtiyor Saidov in Tashkent widened the terrain of diplomatic discourse to include the energy transition, educational exchange, and regional transport integration. By hosting summits and fostering cooperation, Uzbekistan is seeking to establish for itself a profile as a key facilitator in Eurasian affairs. In Kazakhstan, her final significant stop, the meetings with President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and Foreign Minister Murat Nurtleu emphasized macroeconomic diversification and critical raw material supply chains. These are areas in which the EU is not merely a partner but a principal stakeholder.
And yet, it is not only the EU that has begun this strategic deepening. The United Kingdom, post-Brexit and still actively reconfiguring its global engagements, has moved in parallel. April 2025 marked the first anniversary of the UK–Kazakhstan Strategic Partnership and Cooperation Agreement. Foreign Office Minister Stephen Doughty’s recent hosting of the Kazakhstan–UK Strategic Dialogue marked 33 years of formal relations. These diplomatic celebrations, beyond their performativity, represent the UK’s recognition that Kazakhstan, and Central Asia more broadly, is a region where its strategic, commercial, and normative interests intersect.
In this broader convergence, Kazakhstan plays a central structural role of a balancing nature. It shares long borders with both Russia and China; it hosts a significant Russian-speaking population; and it has maintained a political posture of calibrated neutrality during a period of sharply escalated geopolitical tensions. For both the EU and the UK, Kazakhstan’s independence and stability transcend bilateral issues; they have become, indeed, system-stabilizing. With Russia’s unabated aggression in Ukraine and China’s unceasing infrastructure diplomacy across the region, Kazakhstan’s capacity to maintain equidistance becomes a geopolitical asset in itself, even for outsiders like the EU and the UK.
The material vectors of this engagement are principally energy and infrastructure. Kazakhstan remains central to Europe’s energy diversification strategy. For the UK, the logic is even more direct: Kazakhstan supplies approximately 20% of British crude oil imports. British companies such as BP and Shell maintain longstanding investments in the Tengiz and Kashagan fields. The pragmatism of maintaining hydrocarbon fuel flows during the “energy transition” coexists with investment in green energy and renewables, supported through mechanisms like the EU’s Global Gateway and private-sector coordination.
The institutional layer is also to be noted. The Astana International Financial Centre (AIFC), which operates under English common law, offers a familiar regulatory ecosystem for UK-based investors. It also acts as a vector for Kazakhstan’s economic diversification. This policy aspires to curb rentier dependence and to stimulate innovation in finance, technology, and professional services. The EU has historically emphasized regulatory alignment as a strategic vector, so Kazakhstan’s legal and financial modernization presents an attractive pathway to long-term structural alignment.
Beyond finance and energy lie the questions of corridors, logistics, and flows. Kazakhstan’s promotion of the Trans-Caspian International Trade Route (TITR), also called the Middle Corridor, is no longer a boutique project. As trade through Russian territory becomes politically and economically volatile, the corridor has already taken on significant strategic importance. Both Brussels and London have recognized this. The EU backs multimodal infrastructure investment across Central Asia through Global Gateway, while the UK has sought project-specific partnerships aligning with its goals of trade facilitation.
Such convergence, however, takes place within a competitive field. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) still has life in Central Asia, where governments do not see engagement with Europe or the UK as a replacement for Chinese partnership but as a diversification of their own strategic portfolios. What differentiates European and British engagement is not their magnitude but their method of introducing conditionality frameworks, legal transparency, and sustainability metrics. Their models of partnership offer what might be called “predictive credibility” that provides higher informational clarity and so also lower volatility.
The Samarkand summit on April 3–4 will formalize these trajectories. It is expected to produce memoranda and initiatives across digital infrastructure, educational exchange, logistics coordination, and green energy. The summit crystallizes how Europe is shifting its engagement with the region. Central Asia is no longer a periphery but rather a partner, no longer a mere object of policy but a co-agent in system evolution.
Kallas’s mission demonstrates, and UK engagement reinforces, that the architecture of Eurasian engagement is no longer founded on dominance or dependency. It is increasingly shaped by distributed agency, managed asymmetry, and negotiated interdependence. This increased compatibility among the partners enables efficient differentiation and mutual adaptation. This convergence does not ensure broader geopolitical stability, but it does enhance the number of degrees of freedom available to any emergent equilibrium.
