With the final accession of Belarus to the SCO, Mongolia found itself in the curious position of remaining one of the organisation’s two observers, and the only one whose high-level representatives attended the July 2024 summit in Astana. Nevertheless, Mongolia’s President and Foreign Minister have again spoken of preserving and developing the “proactive observer” tradition.

On June 28, 2024, Mongolia held elections to the State Great Khural, the country’s parliament. Due to the special political system in Mongolia, which is a de facto mixed republic with broad parliamentary powers, parliamentary elections are perhaps the key domestic political event in the country. They determine the composition of the Cabinet of Ministers and the real balance of power in the political arena.

Afghanistan holds immense geopolitical significance in the global politics. The country has caught the attention of international powers and newspapers since the 9/11 plane crashes into the World Trade Center. Since then, it continued to remain in the headlines. However, Afghanistan has always been discussed as anything but a chessboard of global politics or a security threat to regional and global peace. These aspects hold significance in shaping the Afghan predicament, but the country’s internal dynamics are also responsible for chaos and turmoil in Afghanistan.

The process of reforming the political system in Uzbekistan reached a fundamentally new level in 2023-2024. The transformations currently being implemented are aimed at increasing the participation of the population in political processes, but in doing so they stay away from Western patterns, instead offering original and even unique solutions that are potentially useful not only for Uzbekistan, but also for other countries in the region…

The ‘Blue Horse’ is a project noble in its designs, aiming to bring water to those lands where sand dust rules. Nevertheless, despite all the imaginary (and quite real) prospects created for Mongolia by this initiative, its implementation is almost inevitably associated with negative consequences for the vast Baikal region. Is there an optimal way out of this difficult situation?

Turkmenistan, whose geographical position seems quite favourable for promoting the initiative for the development of Eurasian transit highways in Central Asia, almost always remains outside the main focus of attention. Nevertheless, the republic is actively exploring the possibilities both of participating in foreign projects and promoting its own, and also seeks to attract as much investment as possible not only in its key oil and gas industry, but also in the field of transport infrastructure.

The military cooperation of the self-proclaimed global hegemon with a small and critically remote state turns out to be, upon careful consideration, multifaceted and profound. A number of facts, showing the active immersion of the United States in the defence sector of Mongolia, prove this to be evident.

Today, in the era of active development of green energy, which has swept not only developed but also developing countries, traditional energy sources such as brown coal remain important in Mongolia – even though renewable energy sources are being developed in parallel in the country. The authorities of the country, where all major energy facilities were built by foreign (in this case Soviet) specialists many decades ago, have in recent years begun to turn their attention back to thermal power generation, abandoning utopian notions of renewable energy as a universal “panacea” capable of ridding the country of the threat of energy shortages without harming the environment.

The struggle for strategic natural resources in post-Soviet Central Asia is reformatting international relations in the region and triggering confrontation between the key players. Turkey is gaining new opportunities on the global stage with the launch of energy transit routes that bypass Russia. Geo-economic and geopolitical significance of natural gas transit routes…

The years 2023-2024 can confidently be called a “boom” period for the development of solar and wind energy in Kyrgyzstan. One of the word’s leading countries in terms of the share of renewable energy in its energy mix, Kyrgyzstan has recently become a haven for investments in green energy from a wide variety of nations. This all ties in with the ambition of Kyrgyzstan’s government to make the Central Asian republic self-sufficient in terms of energy and then transform into an exporter of electricity.

On May 27-28, 2024, a delegation of the Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan, headed by Vice-President Moulawi Rozi Mohammad Rashid, visited Moscow at the invitation of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (OIS RAS). This is the first visit of Afghan scientists to Russia after the Taliban came to power in August 2021.

Kyrgyzstan’s railways currently consist of six sections connected to each other only through the territories of the neighbouring republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In particular, we are talking about the longest northern section – about 300 kilometres from the border with Kazakhstan to Lake Issyk-Kul, as well as five short (a few dozen kilometres) sections, which are dead-end branches to major cities from the railway that runs in an arc through the Uzbek part of the Fergana Valley…