Central Asia Archive

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s April 15-16 visit to Kazakhstan marked an important step forward in India’s ties with the rising Central Asian nation. Relations between the two countries have gained momentum since January 2009, when Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev was the chief guest at India’s Republic Day celebrations. India and Kazakhstan established diplomatic relations in February 1992, with then-Indian Prime Minister Narasimha Rao paying a visit to Kazakhstan in 1993. Prior to his 2009 visit, Nazarbayev had visited India in 1996 and 2002. In a positive development, Singh and Nazarbayev signed a “Joint Action Plan” on furthering the strategic […]

Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov recently met with Chinese Premier Hu Jintao in Beijing, where the two pledged to increase trade and strategic cooperation. In an email interview, Florent Parmentier, an academic adviser and lecturer at Sciences Po, discussed China-Ukraine relations. WPR: What is the extent of diplomatic and trade relations between China and Ukraine? Florent Parmentier: Ukraine’s interest in China is relatively new, and vice versa: The boom in trade dates back only to 2008. Yulia Tymoshenko, then prime minister of Ukraine, was the first to develop connections with Chinese leaders and notably met with Chinese Vice Premier Zhang […]

The Obama administration has begun talks with Afghanistan designed to quell the Karzai government’s fears about being abandoned by the West come 2014. Those talks are said to involve negotiations for long-term basing of U.S. troops involved in training Afghan security forces and supporting future counterterrorism operations. This can be seen as a realistic course of action, given our continuing lack of success in nation-building there, as well as our inability — although perhaps unwillingness is a better term — to erect some regional security architecture that might replace our presence. But there are good reasons to question this course. […]

Kyrgyzstan recently moved to open membership negotiations with the customs union formed by Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus in mid-2010. In an email interview, Alexander Libman, a professor of international political economy at the Frankfurt School of Management and Finance, discussed the prospect of the customs union’s expansion. WPR: What are benefits of the customs union for Russia and the other countries that have joined? Alexander Libman: The three countries in the customs union (CU) — Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan — exhibit a relatively high level of economic interconnection, partly inherited from their Soviet past and partly created anew through the […]

In March, a few international media outlets quietly reported that Mongolia and the U.S. had been holding informal discussions on a proposal that would have Mongolia serve as a regional depository of spent nuclear fuel. The arrangement would allow South Korea and Taiwan, which the U.S. supplies with nuclear rods, to dispose of their spent fuel, resolving what has become an increasingly thorny problem for the U.S. News of the story spread quickly in the Mongolian press, and public opinion came out decidedly against the proposal. The Japanese nuclear crisis in Fukushima has compounded opposition in Mongolia to nuclear energy. […]

On April 4, 2011, Kazakhstan’s Central Election Commission (CEC) announced the preliminary results of the presidential elections held the previous day. As expected, incumbent President Nursultan Nazarbayev won re-election by a wide margin, garnering 95.5 percent of the votes cast. The CEC will announce the final results in a few days, but these are not expected to change the outcome. Despite noting significant irregularities, most of the international observation teams confirmed the outcome’s validity. China, Russia, the United States and many other governments have already congratulated Nazarbayev on his victory. But the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) […]

With energy market observers focused on the Middle Eastern uprisings and the Japanese catastrophe, the entrance on March 21 of the German company Wintershall into the consortium backing the South Stream pipeline came as a great surprise. Inaugurated in 2007 as a 50-50 joint venture between Russian giant Gazprom and Italy’s ENI, the project aims to transport up to 63 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas per year from the eastern shore of the Black Sea to the consuming markets of Eastern, Central and Southern Europe. According to the memorandum of understanding signed in Moscow, Wintershall will acquire a […]