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Mining

Azerbaijan Moves Into Uzbekistan’s Gold and Critical Minerals Sector

Azerbaijan has moved from preliminary mining talks to signed project agreements in Uzbekistan. On June 16, state-owned AzerGold signed an agreement to jointly develop a gold deposit in Uzbekistan. A separate document covered a critical minerals project with NEQSOL Holding. Azerbaijani Prime Minister Ali Asadov and Uzbek Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov attended the ceremony in Tashkent. AzerGold chairman Zakir Ibrahimov and Uzbekistan's First Deputy Mining Minister Feruza Hamidova signed the gold agreement. Public releases provide few details on either project, naming no deposits and disclosing no reserve estimates, ownership split, investment value, production target, or timetable. Three Years of Groundwork AzerGold's entry into Uzbekistan dates to February 24, 2023, when the company signed a memorandum and agreement with Uzbekistan's Ministry of Mining Industry and Geology. The documents covered geological exploration and the development of gold deposits. In August 2024, the two sides discussed projects in Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and third countries, and agreed to deepen cooperation. By May 2026, Uzbek officials were reviewing prospective areas and project documents. "We have begun active joint work with the Azerbaijani company AzerGold on geological exploration in the territory of the Republic of Uzbekistan," Deputy Mining Minister Ural Yusupov said. He added that a decision on joint gold and silver exploration was expected by the end of the year. Yusupov identified Kashkadarya and Surkhandarya as areas under study for precious metals, and Karakalpakstan and Jizzakh for critical minerals. The June signing followed six weeks later, but did not identify the selected deposit. A Much Larger Gold Market AzerGold was established in 2015 and began operations in 2016. The company develops gold, iron, and other metal deposits in Azerbaijan and has extracted ore at its Chovdar gold mine since 2017. In 2025, AzerGold sold 73,200 ounces of gold and 93,200 ounces of silver. Revenue reached 439.3 million manats, about $258 million, up 43% from 2024. Uzbekistan's gold industry operates on a much larger scale. Navoi Mining and Metallurgical Company produced 3.15 million ounces of gold in 2025. The country has set production targets of 120 tonnes for 2026 and 175 tonnes by 2030. The country plans to invest $2.2 billion across 90 mining projects this year. Across the broader mining and metallurgical sector, projects worth $22 billion are expected to create 38,000 jobs. In February, AzerGold identified Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan as possible locations for international expansion. The company prefers brownfield projects with existing infrastructure and production bases. NEQSOL's Critical Minerals Track The second document is broader, covering a joint critical minerals project involving NEQSOL Holding but naming neither the mineral nor the deposit. The group also operates in energy, telecommunications, construction, and high technology. NEQSOL had already established a wider framework with Tashkent. In July 2025, the group and Uzbekistan's Ministry of Investment, Industry and Trade agreed to develop projects in geology and mining, energy, telecommunications, chemicals, construction materials, and digital technology. NEQSOL entered mining in 2025 through its acquisition of UMCC Titanium in Ukraine. UMCC operates the Vilnohirsk and Irshansk mining and processing complexes, which...

TRIPP

The 43 Kilometers That Could Rewire Eurasia

The Caspian Policy Center’s Trans-Caspian Forum 2026 convened U.S. and regional officials at the National Press Club in Washington on June 10 for a discussion of peace, economic security, and durable partnerships. The forum framed a short Armenia-based link as part of a wider effort to turn the Middle Corridor into a working route for cargo, energy, data, and capital. The strategic dialogue was chaired by Dr. Eric Rudenshiold, CPC research director and senior fellow. Speakers included Aryeh Lightstone, Senior Advisor to the Board of Peace and to Ambassador Steve Witkoff; Hikmet Hajiyev, Assistant to Azerbaijan’s president and foreign-policy department head; Yerzhan Kazykhan, Kazakhstan’s presidential representative for U.S. negotiations; Javlon Vakhabov, deputy adviser to Uzbekistan’s president on foreign policy; and Edil Baisalov, Kyrgyzstan’s ambassador to the United States and presidential special envoy. The meeting came as Washington tries to turn the Armenia-Azerbaijan thaw, the C5+1 critical minerals agenda, and private-sector interest into routes that can move cargo, energy, data, and capital across the Caspian. The discussion cast the Middle Corridor as the main strategic alternative linking Central Asian production to western markets. The Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) refers to a planned 43-kilometer link through southern Armenia’s Syunik province, near Meghri and the Arax River, that would connect Azerbaijan with its Nakhchivan exclave. With rail, road, energy, and digital infrastructure, TRIPP is intended to plug into the wider Trans-Caspian route from Central Asia through Azerbaijan and Türkiye to Europe. Aryeh Lightstone opened by placing connectivity inside the Trump administration’s peace and economic-security agenda. His remarks tied Armenia-Azerbaijan diplomacy, the Board of Peace, and the Abraham Accords to the claim that commerce can reinforce peace where standard diplomacy stalled. Lightstone shifted the subject from maps to execution. Customs, regulatory harmonization, digital trade platforms, border procedures, and bankable investment vehicles will decide whether the Middle Corridor becomes a reliable system, he said. His reference to a TRIPP Plus Enterprise Fund pointed to U.S. structures that can move from declarations to projects. Hikmet Hajiyev presented Azerbaijan as the hinge of that system. The Caspian, he argued, does not separate Azerbaijan from Central Asia, but unites them. His line that C5+1 was mathematics while the C6 was chemistry captured Baku’s framing. Azerbaijan is positioning itself as a logistical and strategic extension of Central Asia, connected through Turkic institutions, energy routes, rail, ports, aviation, and digital links. Hajiyev described the Middle Corridor as moving from a supplementary transit route into a strategic geoeconomic system, linking Baku-Tbilisi-Kars rail capacity, Baku port, Nakhchivan, TRIPP, and the planned Trans-Caspian fiber-optic cable with Kazakhstan. Ambassador Kazykhan presented Kazakhstan’s strategic value as something built over time and backed by material capacity, not diplomatic positioning alone. Kazakhstan is by far the region’s largest economy, with the IMF projecting 2026 GDP of about $360 billion. Kazykhan said more than 600 American companies operate in Kazakhstan and cumulative U.S. investment has surpassed $100 billion. Kazakhstan also supplies about 24% of U.S. uranium imports and has reserves or production capacity linked...

Infrastructure finance

Opinion: Central Asia’s Shift from Silk Road Romance to Infrastructure Finance – What the June Forums Are Building

In mid-June, Tashkent and Baku will host two major international finance gatherings within the same regional window: the fifth Tashkent International Investment Forum in Uzbekistan, and the Islamic Development Bank Group’s 2026 Annual Meetings in Azerbaijan. The overlap in timing is useful less as a calendar coincidence than as a signal of how infrastructure, finance, and regional integration are now being discussed together. In Tashkent, the fifth Tashkent International Investment Forum opens under the theme “Investment Resilience: New Frontiers, New Partnerships.” In Baku, the Islamic Development Bank Group will convene delegates from its 57 member countries under the theme “Regional Integration for Sustainable Prosperity.” Add the Astana International Financial Centre’s increasingly active forum calendar, a new cross-border Islamic finance alliance signed in May among regional industry associations, and a stream of connectivity and green investment pledges from recent regional summits, and the wider region looks increasingly focused on turning connectivity talk into investment structures. The more important question is not how much money is being discussed, but what kinds of projects are becoming investable. One answer keeps surfacing: a multi-thousand-kilometer trade route that carries goods from China across Kazakhstan, over the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan, and onward through Georgia and Türkiye to Europe. The Middle Corridor, formally known as the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, runs through many of the investment pitches now being made across the region. The forums show how infrastructure, finance, and regional connectivity are increasingly being discussed together. The corridor is one of the clearest tests of whether that agenda can move from conference language into bankable projects. For most of the past century, the world categorized this region under two headings. One is heritage: the caravanserais and blue domes of the old Silk Road. The other is hydrocarbons: the oil and gas beneath the Caspian basin. Both cast the region as a place value came out of or once passed through. The corridor proposes something more ambitious: that value should pass through again, but this time on terms shaped by the region itself. The shift is from selling what lies underground to earning from where the region sits on the map. Freight volumes on the Middle Corridor have risen roughly fivefold over recent years, while transit times have been cut from about a month to roughly two weeks as border procedures and port operations improved. The World Bank’s benchmark study sets out the goal of tripling freight volumes and halving travel time by 2030, and regional projections now point to annual throughput of around ten million tons or more by the end of the decade. For landlocked economies long dependent on a single route to world markets, a second viable artery is less a convenience than a form of strategic insurance. But turning a route on a map into a working corridor requires serious capital. It requires expanded port capacity on the Caspian, additional vessels and ferries, rail upgrades, terminal infrastructure, and the less visible digital and customs systems that allow cargo to clear multiple borders...

Middle Corridor

Can Caspian Cargo Fleets Meet Middle Corridor Demands?

Construction of infrastructure along the Middle Corridor, also called the Trans-Caspian International Trade Route, to ship goods between China and Europe is progressing at a frantic pace. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, it inadvertently gave a new impetus to the development of a trade network through Central Asia and the South Caucasus that had been slowly taking shape since the end of the 1990s. One of the most formidable challenges along the Middle Corridor is boosting maritime cargo across the Caspian Sea. Steps are being made, including some significant recent moves, but the capacity of shipping east-to-west over the Caspian Sea faces challenges in meeting the ever-growing demand for commercial vessels. By Leaps and Bounds In 2022, the volume of cargo through the Middle Corridor was some 1.5 million tons, more than twice the amount transported in 2021. In 2023, it topped 2.7 million tons, in 2024 was about 4.5 million tons, and in 2025 it was expected to be approximately 5.2 million tons. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Kazakhstan on May 13-14, where his host, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, said the figure could reach 10 million tons “in the near future,” and are predictions it could happen as soon as 2027. The roads, railways, and port facilities along the Middle Corridor are expanding rapidly. However, according to a report from Azerbaijan’s Trend news agency in mid-May, the Azerbaijani Caspian Shipping Company (ASCO) says that since 2013, only “a total of 35 new vessels have been commissioned.” The Merchant Fleets of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan On the eastern side of the Caspian Sea, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have been working to increase their maritime shipping. Both countries invested heavily in upgrading their Caspian ports, in Kazakhstan’s case at Aktau and Kuryk, and for Turkmenistan at Turkmenbashi City. Since the end of April, both countries have moved to boost their potential to ship cargo across the Caspian. Kazakhstan’s state railway company, Kazakhstan Temir Zholy (KTZ), announced on April 30 that it would build its own maritime fleet starting with six new vessels, each with a deadweight of up to 9,900 tons and able to carry up to 537 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU). Once completed, those six cargo ships will join the two dry cargo and three container vessels in the Caspian Sea operated by Kazakhstan’s state maritime shipping company Kazmortransflot. The three container ships – Berkut, Sunkar, and Barys – all started operation in 2019, have a deadweight of 5,200 tons, and can each carry up to 350 TEU. The two dry cargo ships, the Beket Ata and Turkestan, have a deadweight of 5,467 tons and can carry 4,182 tons. On May 12, the dry cargo ship Gadamly arrived at the Baku International Sea Port. The Gadamly is Turkmenistan’s first dry cargo vessel and is able to carry up to 240 TEU. A second cargo vessel, Manzil, should be launched before the end of this year. Arif Aghayev, the deputy chairman of Azerbaijan Railways, said at...

Azerbaijan

Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan Plan New Parks in Tashkent and Baku

Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan have agreed to establish new public parks in each other’s capitals as part of broader efforts to expand bilateral cooperation, Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Investment, Industry and Trade has reported. The announcement followed an official visit to Azerbaijan from April 22 to 24 by a delegation led by Minister Laziz Kudratov. During the trip, talks were held with Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Economy and senior executives from major companies on joint projects and future cooperation. According to the ministry, both sides identified several priority areas, including mining, construction materials, transport and logistics, urban planning, agriculture, and pharmaceuticals. Particular attention was given to plans to create an “Uzbekistan” park in Baku and an “Azerbaijan” park in Tashkent, alongside expanding pharmaceutical retail networks and developing fruit and vegetable processing projects. Trade between the two countries has been growing steadily. In 2025, bilateral trade turnover reached $307.3 million, marking a 14.6% increase compared to the previous year, the ministry said. The Times of Central Asia previously reported that trade rose by 25% in 2024, while the number of joint ventures approached 300, with a combined project portfolio valued at around $4 billion. The two countries have set a target of increasing annual trade and investment to $1 billion by 2030, supported by a comprehensive cooperation program covering sectors such as industry, infrastructure, agriculture, healthcare, tourism, and banking. Progress has also been noted in transport and energy cooperation. Both sides highlighted growing cargo volumes along the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, also known as the Middle Corridor. Uzbek shipments along the route increased by 25% in 2024, exceeding one million tonnes, aided by the introduction of a new electronic permit system.

AZAL Plane Crash

Russia, Azerbaijan Settle Over Airliner Crash in Kazakhstan in 2024

Russia and Azerbaijan said on Wednesday that they have reached “an appropriate settlement” that includes compensation payments in the case of an Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed in Kazakhstan after being damaged by a Russian military strike on Dec. 25, 2024. The agreement reflected efforts by the two countries to resolve a long-running dispute over the crash, which killed 38 of the 67 people on board. The Embraer 190 airliner crashed near the Kazakh city of Aktau after it was struck while trying to land in Grozny, Chechnya, and then diverted across the Caspian Sea. “The steps undertaken confirm the mutual intention to build further mutually beneficial cooperation,” the foreign ministries of Russia and Azerbaijan said in a joint statement. The statement said the settlement was based on an accord reached in October 2025, when Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged in a meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev that Russian missile fire had damaged the plane. Putin indicated that the strike was accidental as it occurred while the Russian military was dealing with a Ukrainian drone attack. His comments went some way toward easing Azerbaijan’s anger over what it viewed as Russian attempts to avoid responsibility for the disaster. The two sides “agreed to appropriately resolve the issues arising from the accident,” which occurred “as a result of the involuntary operation of the air defense system in the airspace of the Russian Federation,” the joint statement said. It expressed condolences to relatives and friends of those who died. The two foreign ministries did not release details of the compensation payments. Kazakhstan is still leading an investigation of the crash.