In mid-2023, as part of its preparation of the country’s 2024 budget, Mongolia’s Ministry of Finance prepared a number of documents containing assessments of national economic development prospects for the next three years.  These documents, which are available on Mongolia’s impressively comprehensive official database, allow observers to assess the Mongolian government’s views on their country’s development potential…

On March 21, 2024, in a formal event held at Astana Square in Almaty, the President of Kazakhstan, Kasym-Jomart Tokayev, congratulated all Kazakhstanis on the holiday of Nauryz. In his speech in the square, the President announced four strategically important national development projects, the promotion of which he designated as a key socio-economic priority for the republic in 2024. These are the reconstruction and modernization of the country’s transport infrastructure and heat and power network…

On 11-12 March, President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev paid a state visit to Azerbaijan, during which he met with the head of the Caspian state – I. Aliyev.  Another important bilateral event that took place during these two days was the first meeting of the Kazakh-Azerbaijani Supreme Interstate Council.

On February 7-8, 2024, the President of the Federal Republic of Germany Frank-Walter Steinmeier paid a visit to Ulaanbaatar. In the course of the visit, the senior German politician held talks with Mongolia’s President, Prime Minister, and the Speaker of the State Great Khural, Mongolia’s Parliament. He was met at the airport by Mongolia’s Foreign Minister…

On March 15, 2024, the foreign ministers of Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan met in Baku. The main outcome of the trilateral negotiations was the signing of the so-called “Baku Declaration,” in which the parties defined the main directions of cooperation development. The meeting was held on the sidelines of the XI Global Baku Forum…

In previous articles we have looked at the process of increasing European engagement in Inner Asia through bilateral initiatives. This time, the reader will get an overview of the interaction between the parties in the framework of the European Global Gateway initiative. On 25-26 October, Brussels hosted the Global Gateway Forum, which was soon described by journalists as “an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative”. It is noteworthy that it took place only a week…

Mongolia adopted its 2024 budget law on October 1, 2023. As part of the preparations for the budget law, an extensive preparatory review of the 2023 figures was performed. These were correlated with the spending plans for 2024, 2025 and 2026, and the results were summarized in a special report published by Mongolia’s Ministry of Finance. The report is primarily a breakdown of Mongolia’s draft budget for 2024. As for the budget itself, the following points made in the report are worthy of note…

The ninth State Great Khural elections in the history of democratic Mongolia will be held this year, on June 28. They will be unprecedented in a number of respects, and their results promise significant differences from the country’s “classic” indicators. As early as 2023, the Mongolian authorities carried out extensive work to prepare the country’s legislative framework for the upcoming elections, reflecting all their new parameters and principles in the relevant legislation…

On 1-2 February 2024, an enlarged meeting of the Eurasian Intergovernmental Council was held in Almaty, which resulted in a vector for the development of the Eurasian partnership both within the EAEU and in the expansion of the partnership between this organisation and the SCO. The success of the meeting and its profound symbolism seem obvious – however, political and economic ties in the Eurasian space are developing intensively not only on the multilateral “track”…

For the last few years, Pakistan has shifted its foreign policy from the one based on geopolitics to the one based on geo-economics. A long history of terrorism, political turbulence, and economic instability, caused by Pakistan’s involvement in regional conflicts, were the key drivers behind this shift in the foreign policy outlook of the nation. The decision was announced in Pakistan’s first-ever National Security Policy (NSP) document in December 2021…

In 2023, Afghanistan experienced a limited return to economic growth and infrastructure development after several years of severing most existing ties. During the year, several significant international events occurred in Central Asia, resulting in increased global attention to the region, and a number of projects of Eurasian scale were initiated. At the end of 2023, it appears that there is a long-term interest from Afghanistan in participating in these projects…

If war is politics by other means, Washington’s ongoing wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe are meant to buttress its global influence on the one hand and undermine its competitors on the other. But the question is: how is this politics by other means working out for Washington? Not so good. Russia’s recent military victories in Ukraine and China’s expansive inroads into the Middle East alongside the growing anti-Americanism in the region (due to Washington’s support for Israel and its inability to prevent a genocide of the Palestinians) indicate an overall…