Diplomacy - The Times Of Central Asia

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Organization of Turkic States (OTS)

Tokayev Proposes Russian Role in OTS as Aliyev Skips Ankara Summit

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has proposed inviting Russia to cooperate with the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) or granting it observer status. He made the proposal on October 30 at the summit in Ankara, where Türkiye assumed the organization's rotating chairmanship from Azerbaijan. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev did not attend, despite a personal invitation from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The participants adopted the Ankara Declaration and appointed Uzbekistan's Mirvokhid Azimov as the new OTS secretary-general. Azerbaijan was represented by Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov. Has Russia Expressed Interest in the OTS? Tokayev proposed two options for Russia's participation: cooperation through the "OTS+" format or observer status. "To enhance the standing of our Organization, it would be a right and fair decision to respond positively to Russia's intention and invite it to join this format or participate in OTS activities as an observer," the Kazakh president said. Tokayev referred to Moscow's intentions, although Russia itself has made no public announcement of plans to participate in the OTS. The Kazakh president justified the initiative by citing Russia's historical ties with Turkic peoples, its Turkic-speaking population, and the "Altai – Cradle of Turkic Civilization" project. The OTS comprises Türkiye, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. Turkmenistan participates as an observer. Russia is not a member, but its population includes Tatars, Bashkirs, Yakuts, and other Turkic peoples. The proposed arrangements differ. OTS+ provides a framework for cooperation with external partners, while observer status allows more regular participation in the organization's activities without the decision-making rights of full members. In the same speech, Tokayev stressed once again that the OTS should not become a military alliance. Among its members, Türkiye belongs to NATO, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and Uzbekistan maintains a policy of nonparticipation in military blocs. Aliyev's Absence: Scheduling Conflict or Political Signal? Erdoğan had invited Aliyev to the summit during a telephone conversation on October 21. The Azerbaijani president, however, remained in Baku. Citing sources, an Azerbaijani news agency report attributed his absence to a previously scheduled appearance at an awards ceremony for finalists in an international FIFA U-15 football tournament. Public disagreements have emerged between the two allies in recent months. In Türkiye, critics have raised objections to restrictions on religious clothing in Azerbaijani schools. Baku regarded the criticism as interference in its domestic affairs and barred more than 30 Turkish citizens from entering the country. Another source of disagreement is Azerbaijan's relationship with Israel. Ankara strongly criticizes the Israeli government's actions, while Baku continues to cooperate with Israel in the energy and defense sectors. Azerbaijani political analyst Ilgar Velizade told Daily Europe Online that Turkish efforts to ease tensions had not resolved the disagreements. He cited the dismissal of Erdoğan adviser Oktay Saral following remarks critical of Azerbaijan. In Velizade's assessment, Baku may have regarded the move as a temporary concession ahead of the summit. The analyst also emphasized that Azerbaijan does not intend to change its relationship with Israel because of Türkiye's position....

Republic Day

Kazakhstan Marks Republic Day as World Leaders Send Congratulations

Kazakhstan marked Republic Day on October 25 with a flag-raising ceremony in Astana and congratulations from its international partners. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio used the occasion to describe bilateral relations as the “strongest” in their history. “Our countries are working together to strengthen regional security, expand economic cooperation, and create new commercial opportunities which will pair Kazakh ambition with American innovation to benefit both of our nations,” Rubio said in his October 24 statement. He praised Kazakhstan’s diplomatic role and support for President Donald Trump’s “peace initiatives,” and said the U.S. looks forward to further cooperation in the year ahead, both bilaterally and through the C5+1 framework, which brings together the United States and the five Central Asian countries. Trump sent a separate message to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. According to Akorda’s account, he welcomed the enhanced strategic partnership and said he wanted to continue developing his relationship with the Kazakh leader. Russian President Vladimir Putin also congratulated Tokayev, describing bilateral relations as developing “in the spirit of strategic partnership and alliance.” He pledged to strengthen cooperation and linked closer ties to security and stability across Eurasia. Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed his readiness to deepen cooperation, while praising Kazakhstan’s development. The presidents of the other four Central Asian countries also sent congratulations. King Charles III of Great Britain conveyed his wishes to Tokayev and the Kazakh people, highlighting the friendship between the two countries. French President Emmanuel Macron pointed to growing cooperation ahead of the 35th anniversary of diplomatic relations. UN Secretary-General António Guterres was also among those who sent messages. [caption id="attachment_59283" align="aligncenter" width="1774"] Image: Akorda.kz[/caption] In Kazakhstan, Tokayev attended the national flag-raising ceremony outside the Akorda presidential residence. The honor guard commander reported to the president before the flag was raised and the national anthem played. The presidency announced similar ceremonies across the country’s regions. In his Republic Day message, Tokayev described Kazakhstan as a respected and influential middle power. He emphasized continued political and economic reforms, technological modernization, and the expanding use of artificial intelligence, while calling for national unity. In Almaty, more than 1,500 people gathered near the Medeu mountain skating rink for a flag-raising ceremony. A military brass band played the national anthem as the flag rose on a 40-meter pole. The city also marked Republic Day with a festive concert at the Republic Palace. [caption id="attachment_59286" align="aligncenter" width="1774"] Image: Almaty Akimat[/caption] Republic Day commemorates the Declaration of State Sovereignty, adopted by the Supreme Soviet of the Kazakh SSR on October 25, 1990. The declaration affirmed territorial integrity and established the political and legal foundations for the country’s future independence. Kazakhstan remained within the Soviet Union at that point. It formally declared independence on December 16, 1991, becoming the last Soviet republic to do so. This year’s Republic Day therefore marks 36 years since the sovereignty declaration, ahead of the 35th anniversary of independence in December. The holiday itself has undergone several changes. Republic Day was removed from the public holiday calendar in...

CICA

Kazakhstan Proposes a Preventive Diplomacy Mechanism for CICA

Kazakhstan’s proposal to establish a preventive diplomacy mechanism presents the Asian forum with a specific task: determining who, with whose consent, and through what procedures can help reduce tensions before they escalate into open conflict. On October 15, 2026, at the seventh summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) in Baku, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev proposed launching a preventive diplomacy mechanism. The initiative came amid efforts to transform CICA into a full-fledged international organization and make its activities more practical. However, the proposed mechanism’s process for requesting assistance, powers, funding, and operating procedures were not detailed in the summit announcement. For Central Asia, crisis prevention has direct practical significance. Disagreements over water use, transit restrictions, or disruptions to cross-border infrastructure can affect several countries simultaneously. Even a technical problem can take on a political dimension if the parties lack agreed-upon information and have no way to discuss the situation quickly. Preventive diplomacy is useful at a stage when there is still room for agreement, but routine working contacts are no longer sufficient. CICA already has a foundation for such work. Its activities are based on sovereign equality, noninterference, and consensus-based decision-making. The Catalogue of Confidence Building Measures covers military-political, economic, environmental, and human issues, as well as new challenges and threats. Its agenda includes transport corridors, energy security, and cooperation in the digital sphere. Discussions on crisis prevention can therefore be linked to existing areas of cooperation. As Aigerim Bakhtiyarova, deputy director of the Institute of Applied Research and Analytics at the Academy of Public Administration under the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, noted in comments to The Times of Central Asia, differences in the foreign policy doctrines and geopolitical positions of CICA member states do not diminish their shared interest in regional security. “Today, strategic predictability has become a very rare but very important condition for multilateral partnership, essential for peace, stability, and development,” the expert said. In her assessment, even countries engaged in open rivalry have an interest in maintaining channels of communication that can prevent conflicts from spreading and limit the associated economic and humanitarian costs. However, a shared interest in preventing conflicts does not necessarily mean that states are prepared to grant additional powers to a multilateral mechanism. The principle of consensus creates conditions for trust while also setting limits on the future mechanism. When members’ interests diverge, agreeing on a collective position may take longer than the pace of a developing crisis allows. Therefore, in developing the initiative, it is important to determine which actions require a separate decision by all member states and which can be carried out under a previously agreed mandate, at the request and with the consent of the parties directly concerned. The following are possible approaches to implementing the proposal, rather than announced components of the mechanism. One realistic option could be a system of national contact points authorized to receive requests for urgent consultations. Their task would be to quickly connect the...

Avaza Summit

Central Asia and Azerbaijan Head to Avaza for First Formal Summit

On Thursday, Turkmen President Serdar Berdimuhamedov is due to receive Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Sadyr Japarov, Emomali Rahmon, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, and Ilham Aliyev in a place built to impress visitors. Thursday’s meeting will be the first formal consultative summit since Azerbaijan joined the format as a full participant in November 2025. The six presidents have already met once in the new configuration, at an informal gathering in Cholpon Ata on July 31, where they signed a declaration covering closer cooperation on transport, energy, trade, and security. Construction of Avaza began in late 2007, as Turkmenistan sought to create a national showcase on its Caspian coast. The resort’s hotels and sanatoria sit among parks and entertainment complexes, while eleven road and foot bridges span a seven-kilometer artificial canal. According to official figures, its hotels and recreation facilities can accommodate more than 10,000 vacationers. State institutions send employees there for summer holidays, echoing the Soviet tradition of workplace-organized vacations. These holidays help fill a resort where the seasonal rhythms differ sharply from everyday life in neighboring Turkmenbashi. Officially, Avaza is a district of Turkmenbashi, a city of around 90,000 residents located 580 kilometers west of Ashgabat across the Karakum Desert. The working city's economy is built around oil refining, the port, and transport. The Turkmenbashi International Seaport traces its history to 1896 and was rebuilt on a large scale before reopening in its current form in 2018. The Turkmenbashi refinery complex was founded in 1943 and remains one of the country's main oil-processing centers. The city itself was known as Krasnovodsk until 1993, when it was renamed Turkmenbashi after the title used by then-President Saparmurat Niyazov. The sea that was supposed to be Avaza's main attraction is now retreating from it. In 2024, one visitor told RFE/RL that the shoreline was 25-30 meters farther away than when his family had swum there three years earlier. A correspondent found hotels creating new beach areas farther out, while dredging was underway near the port. By September 2026, shallower water was forcing some ferries to carry lighter loads and pushing ports around the sea into costly dredging and berth work. The effects are already visible along the coast where the leaders will meet. [caption id="attachment_57713" align="aligncenter" width="1774"] The Avaza resort on Turkmenistan’s Caspian coast, where the five Central Asian presidents and Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev are due to meet on October 8.[/caption] Turkmenistan is also hosting Caspian-focused meetings around the leaders' gathering, while the October 8 agenda includes climate, water, trade, energy, transport, and regional security. At the November 2025 summit in Tashkent, the five Central Asian presidents unanimously approved Azerbaijan’s admission as a full participant, extending the grouping across the Caspian into the South Caucasus. Aliyev has been careful to mark the change. At the informal meeting in Cholpon Ata on July 31, he said: "I previously participated as a guest of honor, but today I am taking part as a full member of the team." The format dates to 2018 and was deliberately light on bureaucracy....

CAMCA

At CAMCA, Uzbekistan Revives Push for a Stronger Regional Body

Uzbekistan has renewed its call for a stronger regional institution, with senior senator Sodiq Safoev urging Central Asian leaders to move beyond their consultative meeting format. His remarks in Baku return attention to a proposal President Shavkat Mirziyoyev outlined last November, when he called for a Community of Central Asia. Safoev, first deputy chairman of Uzbekistan’s Senate, told the CAMCA Regional Forum on October 1: “I think the time has come to transform the Consultative Meeting … into another institutional structure, not simply a Consultative Meeting, but something more.” S. Frederick Starr, chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, also called for stronger regional institutions at the forum, arguing that institutional development needed to support the expansion of transport and commercial links across the region. At the November 16, 2025, summit in Tashkent, Mirziyoyev proposed a rotating secretariat and stronger rules governing the leaders’ meetings. He also proposed making national coordinators special presidential representatives, giving them greater political authority. The secretariat would coordinate work between summits. The machinery for regular cooperation is already developing. The Council of National Coordinators held its first meeting in Tashkent on January 30–31, 2025, where foreign ministry representatives from all five Central Asian states discussed preparations for Uzbekistan’s chairmanship and a schedule of joint events. Mirziyoyev returned to the institutional argument at the July 31 informal summit in Cholpon Ata, calling for closer contacts between government departments and long-term joint programs, alongside effective cooperation institutions. His agenda included further work on common digital services and investment platforms, as well as industrial links connecting production across national borders. He also urged stronger coordination in the Central Asia Plus diplomatic formats through which the region engages outside powers. Azerbaijan’s participation has widened the scope of those discussions. The five Central Asian presidents accepted Azerbaijan as a full participant in November 2025, extending the format across the Caspian. The six-country grouping, increasingly described as C6, connects Central Asian producers with a country whose ports and onward transport links provide access through the South Caucasus to European markets. At an August 12 discussion in Washington, Uzbekistan’s ambassador Furqat Sidiqov emphasized market access and called for further digitalization of the Middle Corridor. He said Uzbekistan had about 1,500 joint ventures with neighboring states, compared with close to 300 involving Central Asian countries in 2017. Turkmenistan’s ambassador, Esen Aydogdyyev, stressed simpler customs procedures and argued that his country’s permanent neutrality was compatible with deeper economic cooperation. The commercial ambition also extends to joint production. In Baku, Azerbaijan’s minister of the economy Mikayil Jabbarov urged countries to build regional value chains in sectors where their economies complement each other. “We should increasingly produce together,” he said, pointing to companies and financial institutions already operating in one another’s markets. Moving freight across the Caspian requires countries to coordinate customs procedures and transport services. The World Bank’s new Trans-Caspian corridor study identifies fragmented governance and uneven policy implementation as problems that compound infrastructure bottlenecks. It estimates that at least $25 billion is needed through 2040...

C5+1

C5+1 Meets Again in Samarkand, but Central Asia Has Changed

In mid-October, C5+1 will meet again in Samarkand, where its first ministerial was held in November 2015. The regional actor it was created to engage has, however, changed substantially. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is expected to arrive with representatives of more than 100 American companies for talks focused on regional economic connectivity, energy security, trade, private investment, and economic modernization. John Kerry convened the first C5+1 ministerial in Samarkand on November 1, 2015, after the six governments had met in New York that September and agreed to regular consultations. The initial agenda already treated security, economic connectivity, and environmental problems as fields where regional approaches could add value. The question is what purposes C5+1 serves now. C5+1 itself began with a Kazakhstani initiative. As S. Frederick Starr recently reconstructed the history, Ambassador Kairat Umarov, after consulting Astana, proposed in 2013 that Washington create a regular mechanism for engaging Central Asia collectively rather than only through five bilateral relationships. The State Department subsequently developed the proposal, and the format took institutional shape in 2015. That origin rules out any account in which regional agency appears only later. Kazakhstan helped create the mechanism through which Washington would engage the region collectively; the five states’ own capacity for regional coordination deepened substantially thereafter. The second ministerial in Washington in 2016 launched joint projects in economic connectivity, renewable energy, climate resilience, and security, while explicitly recognizing the value of regional approaches. A secretariat was established in 2022; the format reached presidential level for the first time in New York a year later. That summit also produced plans for a private-sector business platform and a Critical Minerals Dialogue, which held its inaugural meeting in February 2024. Its basic structure has remained the same: the United States engages the five Central Asian states collectively. Alongside C5+1, the five developed their own regional process, independent of any outside partner. President Shavkat Mirziyoyev proposed regular consultations among the Central Asian leaders in 2017, and their first Consultative Meeting took place in Astana in March 2018. Further meetings followed in Tashkent in 2019 and Turkmenistan in 2021 before the process moved to Cholpon-Ata in 2022. Subsequent meetings extended the process into trade, transport, energy, water, security, and cultural cooperation. The process remained intergovernmental and did not require policy uniformity among the five states. It gave them a recurring political process of their own. By 2022, the process had expanded from consultation among the five to coordination in dealing with outside partners. At the fourth Consultative Meeting in Cholpon-Ata, the leaders adopted a regional cooperation roadmap for 2022–2024, a Green Agenda, and a Concept of Interaction of the Central Asian States in Multilateral Formats. A treaty on friendship, good-neighborliness, and cooperation for the development of Central Asia in the twenty-first century was also opened for signature. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev had proposed regular foreign-minister consultations to develop coordinated approaches to regional and international issues. He specifically connected the multilateral-formats concept to cooperation with non-regional strategic partners. The Concept of Interaction...