Turan Research Center

Central Asian governments are willing to summon Russia's ambassadors. Over the past two years, Bishkek has done so over a police raid on a Moscow bathhouse that left Kyrgyz migrants beaten; Tashkent over the nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin's public musing about "annexing" Uzbek territory; Dushanbe over the murder of a Tajik schoolboy outside Moscow. These are not the gestures of states that cannot say no to the Kremlin. They are calibrated acts of protest, deployed when a grievance is visible enough at home that silence would cost more than the friction with Moscow.

One grievance never makes the list. Russia is drawing thousands of Central Asian citizens into its war against Ukraine, and on this, the foreign ministries of Astana, Bishkek, Dushanbe, and Tashkent have said nothing — not once, at least publicly. The contrast is the analytical puzzle worth explaining. These governments will confront Moscow over the mistreatment of their citizens, but not over their recruitment, and the reason is not weakness. It is that recruitment touches the one Russian interest these states judge too costly to contest: the Kremlin's need for manpower.

Why foreign recruitment matters to Moscow

The value of foreign recruits to Russia is best understood against the politics of its own mobilization. When Putin announced a "partial" mobilization in September 2022 — later claiming 318,000 men drafted against a stated target of 300,000 — the move triggered the outcome the Kremlin most feared: protests in dozens of cities and an exodus of working-age men, with credible estimates of those who left Russia that year ranging from the high hundreds of thousandsinto the low millions. The lesson Moscow drew was that announced conscription is politically radioactive. It pivoted to paid volunteers, offering signing bonuses and monthly allowances well above prevailing wages, and, increasingly, to foreigners.

Foreigners solve a specific problem. Battlefield attrition is severe — NATO estimates Russian losses at between 1.3 and 1.45 million total casualties, including roughly 500,000 dead — and those casualties are themselves a source of domestic resentment. Recruiting abroad lets the Kremlin generate frontline manpower while keeping the human cost outside Russian households. A joint study by the International Federation for Human Rights, Truth Hounds, and the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, published in April 2026, found that Russia has recruited at least 27,000 foreign nationals from more than 130 countries since the full-scale invasion — a force comparable in size to the standing army of the Czech Republic, and one the report concludes is increasingly sustained through deception and coercion rather than ideology. Central Asians are the largest national contingent.

Moscow has also signaled how much it values this pipeline. In March 2026, Russia adopted legislation shielding foreign nationals who served under contract from extradition and administrative deportation, voiding such measures retroactively. The message to a recruit weighing the risk of prosecution back home is plain: serve, and Russia will not hand you over. For the sending states, that is the tell. Recruitment is not a peripheral irritant in the relationship; it is wired into Russia's capacity to keep fighting, which is why pressing on it carries a different order of risk than protesting a bathhouse raid.

How Central Asians end up in the war

The exact number of regional citizens fighting for Russia is unknown — Moscow conceals it, and distinguishing current nationals from naturalized former migrants is difficult. In May 2025 the head of Russia's Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, spoke of 20,000 Central Asian natives with acquired Russian citizenship sent to the front. The most-cited running tally comes from Ukraine's I Want to Live project, which operates within Kyiv's Coordinating Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War and draws on Ukrainian military intelligence — a source with an evident interest in the issue, and one whose figures are best read as identifications rather than settled counts. As of May 2026, it had named 12,919 Central Asian citizens under contract with the Russian defense ministry: Uzbekistan accounts for the most at roughly 4,955, followed by Tajikistan (3,489), Kazakhstan (2,420), Kyrgyzstan (1,474), and Turkmenistan (581).

The distribution tracks labor migration. Russia recruits overwhelmingly from foreigners already on its territory, and Uzbek and Tajik migrants form the largest such communities — by official accounts roughly 1.3 million Uzbeks and around a million Tajiks. The methods range from inducement to outright coercion. Recruiters advertise large signing payments and fast-tracked citizenship; the Uzbek migrant Gulomjon Adizov told the project Shaman TV he enlisted expecting an accelerated passport. Others are pressed: detainees nearing release are moved and offered contracts, migrants caught in fabricated drug cases are given a choice between prison and a contract, and labor disputes are resolved with the same ultimatum. The pattern is consistent — Russia converts legal and economic vulnerability into frontline manpower.

That dynamic also explains why captured Central Asians linger in Ukrainian camps. Kyiv treats all Russian-army personnel as combatants regardless of nationality, and under the Geneva Conventions returns prisoners to the power on which they depend — Russia. But Moscow prioritizes its own citizens in exchanges and, by the I Want to Live project's account, has never specifically sought the return of a Central Asian national; the handful exchanged held Russian passports as well. The men fall into a gap no state with leverage is working to close — including their own governments, which is the same forbearance visible at the diplomatic level.

What the states do at home

The claim that these governments simply submit to Russia does not survive contact with their own courtrooms, and the variation between them is itself informative. All five criminalize mercenary activity and participation in foreign conflicts; enforcement diverges sharply.

Kazakhstan is the most active. Its code offers two charges — mercenaryism, carrying seven to ten years (and up to life where deaths result), and the easier-to-prove participation in foreign armed conflicts, at five to nine. Investigators lean on the latter, since mercenaryism requires proving financial motive; of twenty rulings between 2023 and 2025, nineteen used the participation charge. In 2025, Kazakh authorities opened 709 cases for participation and 28 for mercenaryism, according to Mediazona and the Farewell to Arms project. Sentences, though, often fell below the statutory minimum on guilty pleas — leniency that, as the human-rights lawyer Artur Alkhastov notes, does little to deter.

The others show lighter or near-absent enforcement. Kyrgyzstan has handed down at least sixteen mercenaryism sentences and detained four people for recruitment in April 2025 — but released two of them to house arrest after the Russian ambassador met the head of its security service, and has revisited convictions under Russian pressure. Uzbekistan opened 338 cases since 2022 yet imprisoned defendants in only five of fifteen reviewed verdicts, favoring restrictions on freedom. Tajikistan's prosecutor general confirmed in February 2026 that not a single Tajik had been held to account. In Turkmenistan, a returning fighter reportedly avoided punishment through a bribe.

The spread maps onto exposure and capacity, not onto a single posture toward Moscow. But every government converges on the same line: prosecute at home, where the audience is domestic, and stay silent abroad, where the audience is the Kremlin.

Ukraine's approach as a probe

Kyiv has tested where that line sits, with a good-cop, bad-cop division of labor. Its diplomats keep the public conversation positive — Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha used a May 2026 interview to discuss Kazakh participation in Ukraine's reconstruction while saying nothing about Kazakh citizens at the front, and Deputy Foreign Minister Oleksandr Mishchenko, pressed in Tashkent in April 2026, offered only that Ukraine would handle cases individually with Uzbek authorities. The pressure comes instead from I Want to Live, which publishes lists of identified and killed mercenaries — pointedly timing one release to the Central Asian leaders who attended Moscow's Victory Day parade — and sets out demands the diplomats avoid voicing: direct pressure on Russia, prosecution of recruiters and fighters, and public warnings to migrants. The split lets Kyiv apply pressure without spending its own diplomatic capital, and the muted official response from the region marks the limit it has reached: these states will quietly verify lists and prosecute at home, but will not be drawn into a public reckoning with Moscow.

Why the silence holds

To attribute that silence to dependence alone would be too simple, given how readily the same governments protest other Russian conduct. The forbearance is better read as a cost calculation that comes out differently for recruitment than for anything else.

Recruitment is the issue Moscow has signaled it cares about most, having legislated to keep foreign fighters beyond the reach of their home courts; contesting it invites disproportionate retaliation — intensified recruitment, trade pressure, or the propaganda machine turned on regional leaders. It also runs through the migrants themselves, whose remittances and absence from domestic labor markets these economies depend on; a Russian move to expel them would import unemployment and unrest. And some governments are themselves profiting from the war economy: Kyrgyzstan posted roughly 10 percent GDP growth in the first nine months of 2025 on a re-export boom, the same boom that in April 2026 made it the first country ever targeted by the EU's anti-circumvention tool. Set against all that, the recruitment of several thousand citizens — many of whom, officials privately note, went for the money — is a cost these states have decided to absorb rather than fight.

The cost deferred

That decision is a present choice with a future price, which is where its real significance lies. The men being recruited now will, in numbers, eventually come home with combat experience and a habit of settling matters by force. Russia's own experience is the warning: the SOC ACE program documents a nearly seventeenfold rise in murder and attempted-murder convictions involving military personnel inside Russia between 2021 and 2025. In a region where interstate violence still flares — the Kyrgyzstan–Tajikistan border clashes of 2022 are only the most recent example, despite a 2025 demarcation deal — a population of battle-hardened returnees is a destabilizing input that each government will eventually have to manage. The same states now choosing not to confront Moscow over recruitment are, by that choice, deferring the security problem they will face when the recruits return.

Grigorii is a Ukrainian journalist originally from Kyrgyzstan. He has more than 15 years of experience working with Ukrainian and international media, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. His primary areas of focus are the consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, war crimes investigations, and Ukrainian relations with Central Asia.

Illustration by Dinmukhamed Kairulla.

The recent Hudson Institute study on the growing Iranian influence in Georgia has drawn significant attention to Georgian-Iranian relations. Following this investigative study, global media, including Persian-speaking groups, have actively published critical articles about Iranian penetration in Georgia. The Washington Post published an opinion piece titled "A former U.S. ally is slipping into Iran's orbit." Around the same time, a U.S. State Department delegation visited Tbilisi in late May for senior-level talks, raising Tbilisi's expectations of a genuine reset in U.S.-Georgia relations. This convergence of events has sparked debate about how a possible realignment between Tbilisi and Washington might reshape the trajectory of Georgian-Iranian relations. Yet to understand the limits of any such shift, one must look to history.

Why Georgia's Threat Environment Drives Everything

Georgia was once among the richest Soviet republics, yet it emerged from the Soviet collapse as one of the poorest and most security-vulnerable post-Soviet states, burdened by a continuous military threat from Russia and two breakaway regions. Beyond these threats, the country occupies a geopolitical periphery characterized by a fragile security environment and a weak democratic tradition. Faced with these compounding challenges, Eduard Shevardnadze chose to anchor Georgia's political future to Euro-Atlantic institutions and forge partnerships with the developed West.

The 2008 War deepened Georgia's vulnerability significantly. Russia formally recognized the independence of Abkhazia and the so-called South Ossetia, and then, under the banner of "borderization," continued occupying Georgian territory, advancing to within reach of the country's central highway. Since recognizing these separatist regimes, Russia has persistently sought broader international recognition for them, a campaign that has posed a serious and ongoing challenge for Georgian diplomacy, given the considerable disparity between Georgian and Russian diplomatic resources.

Despite Georgia's recent and dramatic foreign policy shift from a pro-Western to a multi-vector orientation, the country's existential threats have remained unchanged. The Russian occupation continues, and the Kremlin has not withdrawn its recognition of the breakaway regions. While Georgia's diversified foreign policy posture has somewhat softened rhetoric from Moscow, the absence of strong strategic partners such as the United States and the EU leaves Georgia even more exposed to Russian pressure and potential aggression.

Ultimately, Georgian foreign policy is heavily shaped by these enduring factors, and no Georgian government, regardless of its stated foreign policy orientation, can simply disregard them. This holds true whether the relationship in question is with the United States or with Iran.

Tehran's Early Bid for the Corridor

Despite Iran's historical claims on the Caucasus region, Tehran was among the first to engage with newly independent Georgia following the Soviet collapse. After Georgia declared independence under Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Iran sent one of the earliest governmental delegations and promptly recognized Georgian sovereignty. Seeking to break out of its international isolation, Tehran identified the Caucasus, and Georgia's transit potential in particular, as a strategic corridor linking Russia and the former socialist countries. In April 1995, President Rafsanjani — one of the founding fathers of the Islamic Republic of Iran — visited Georgia and personally asked head of state Eduard Shevardnadze to show him the Poti Port, the maritime gateway of Georgia and the South Caucasus. Following that visit, the Georgian and Iranian governments began active collaboration on the memorandum of understanding in the economic and industrial sectors, which opened much of Georgia's Soviet-era industrial base to Iranian participation. Beyond transit and industrial interests, Iran was keenly interested in Georgia's Soviet-era scientific establishment, particularly in the field of nuclear physics. According to various sources, several Georgian physicists from the Sukhumi Institute of Physics and Technology (SIPT) worked on the Iranian nuclear program in the late 1990s. This alignment alarmed Washington, which pressured Shevardnadze's government to sever all cooperation with Iran, hand over the names of the Georgian physicists involved, and in exchange promised American assistance in rebuilding the country. Ironically, the Iranian factor became one of the catalysts that helped drive the development of Georgian-U.S. relations.

Out of this turbulent early period emerged what became known as "cold friendly" relations between Georgia and Iran: limited engagement built on mutual recognition of core interests, including respect for Georgia's territorial integrity and a Georgian commitment to refraining from joining anti-Iranian coalitions.

Three Decades of Pressure and Recalibration

As Georgia deepened its alignment with the Euro-Atlantic space, its distance from Iran grew accordingly, and the Rose Revolution intensified that alignment and drew open dissatisfaction from Tehran. Iranian leaders came to treat Georgia's revolution as a cautionary model for the kind of Western-backed political change they feared at home — a framing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei made explicit during Iran's 2009 post-election unrest, when he dismissed the protest movement by insisting its backers were wrong to "think this is Georgia," where a color revolution could be engineered. In addition, Tehran viewed Georgia's growing alignment with NATO and Israel with suspicion, believing it could serve as a platform for collecting intelligence on Iran or even facilitating strikes against it — a fear that appeared plausible to Tehran in the wake of the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns. This suspicion deepened around Georgian-Israeli defense cooperation, which intensified during the 2006–2008 tenure of Davit Kezerashvili — a Georgian Jew with Israeli citizenship — as defense minister. In Tehran's telling, Israel gained access to two former Soviet airbases in southern Georgia under his watch and used them to surveil Iran. Yet wariness did not preclude cooperation. In January 2006, the Ahmadinejad government supplied emergency gas to Georgia after pipeline explosions that Tbilisi attributed to Russian sabotage severed supplies in the middle of winter and plunged the country into an energy crisis.

Despite the early hostility in Iranian rhetoric, the "cold friendly" dynamic largely held throughout the Saakashvili era. Notably, the fact that Iran maintained strategic ties with Georgia's arch-rival Russia, while Georgia cultivated strategic ties with Iran's arch-rivals the United States and Israel, did not fundamentally destabilize bilateral relations.

After the 2008 War, when Russia sought international recognition for Georgia's breakaway regions, Iran, itself an ethnically diverse country sensitive to separatist precedents, declined to grant that recognition, adhering instead to the principle of Georgia's territorial integrity. However, the war's grave consequences left Georgia diplomatically weakened and unable to resist American pressure. In 2008, Georgian authorities extradited the Iranian national Amir Hossein Ardebili — arrested in Tbilisi in 2007 — to the United States; the case's public disclosure in 2009 triggered serious tension with Tehran and, reportedly, the evacuation of Georgian embassy staff from Iran. Relations did not normalize until 2011, when Georgia introduced a visa-free regime with Iran, a significant gain for the internationally isolated country.

The liberalization of Georgia's visa regime for Iranian nationals opened the country not only to ordinary Iranian citizens but also to individuals affiliated with the Iranian state and its sanctions-evasion networks, who saw Georgia as a convenient gateway for circumventing Western sanctions. This dynamic became evident as early as 2011, when Iranian businessmen — including Pourya Nayebi, Houshang Hosseinpour, and Houshang Farsoudeh, all three later sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2014 under Executive Order 13608 — established an extensive commercial network in Georgia used to help Tehran evade sanctions. In 2012, Georgian security services defused a bomb planted under an Israeli embassy vehicle in Tbilisi, an attack attributed to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), underscoring the security dimension of Iran's growing presence. In November 2022, Georgia's State Security Service announced it had foiled an IRGC-linked plot by an Iranian-Pakistani cell to assassinate Itzik Moshe, head of the Israel–Georgia Chamber of Commerce — not, the Jerusalem Post reported, Tehran's first attempt on his life.

By 2013, with the Georgian Dream party newly in power, the scale of Iranian activity had attracted serious attention from Washington. The Treasury Department grew increasingly alarmed at signs that operations on Georgian territory bore the hallmarks of money laundering and sanctions circumvention. Through a joint U.S.–Georgian effort, several Iranian-linked companies — including JSC InvestBank and the airline Fly Georgia — folded, and Tbilisi reinstated visa requirements for Iranian citizens, a measure that remained in place for roughly two years.

Iran's strategy in Georgia has not been confined to finance and logistics. Tehran has also pursued a sustained soft-power campaign aimed at Georgia's ethnic Azerbaijani Shia minority, viewing the community as a natural ideological foothold. Through religious and cultural outreach, Iran has sought to promote its brand of state-sponsored Shia theology and political ideology among Georgian Azerbaijanis, extending its influence beyond commerce and into the realm of identity and belief.

When Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA and launched his "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran, Georgia informally aligned with the sanctions regime. Georgian private banks barred Iranian citizens from opening international accounts, residency permits became increasingly difficult to obtain, and border rejections rose sharply. In response, the Iranian parliament issued sharp criticism of Georgia and called on Georgian authorities to reconsider their stance. The Covid-19 pandemic then brought Georgian-Iranian relations to their lowest point in decades, as border closures effectively severed all remaining ties.

Following the prolonged border closures, flights between the two countries resumed in 2021, and economic ties began a slow, modest recovery. It was in this context that Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze made two visits to Iran in 2024 — first for President Ebrahim Raisi's funeral in May, then for President Masoud Pezeshkian's inauguration in July — drawing alarm from Georgia's former partners in Brussels and Washington. At first glance, a head of government attending a state funeral in a nearby country is unremarkable. But the timing was telling: Kobakhidze's appearances in Tehran came precisely as Tbilisi's relations with the United States and the European Union were deteriorating sharply.

It should also be noted that, in a further complication, Georgia simultaneously deepened its ties with Israel during this period, a development that generated deeply contradictory perceptions of Georgia's evolving foreign policy trajectory, including in Tehran itself. Tehran, as always, closely monitors every development in Georgia-Israel relations, especially after the 12-Day War of June 2025. Shortly after that war, in August 2025, Israel's Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, traveled to Tbilisi for meetings with Georgian Interior Minister Gela Geladze and Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze, framed officially as an effort to deepen law-enforcement and counter-terrorism cooperation. Geladze reciprocated with a visit to Israel two months later, during which the two interior and security ministries signed a memorandum of understanding formalizing cooperation in law enforcement and security. Iran's state-aligned outlet Tabnak interpreted this trajectory — coupled with Tbilisi's perceived drift from Washington and Brussels — as confirmation of Georgia's emerging "multi-vector" foreign policy, one that simultaneously courts Tehran and Jerusalem. Yet for all of Georgia's rhetorical balancing act, one pattern remains unmistakable: any visible deepening of Georgian-Israeli cooperation, particularly in security and law enforcement, is read in Tehran as a direct provocation.

Georgia's Security Calculus and the Iran War

Given Georgia's enduring vulnerability to Russian pressure, maintaining workable relations with major regional powers, including Iran, has long been a strategic imperative. The ongoing U.S.-Iran War adds a further dimension to this calculus: any improvement in U.S.-Georgia relations cannot realistically be pursued at the cost of a serious rupture with Tehran.

Despite Georgia's unexpected foreign policy transformation, its underlying security calculus has not changed. Russian occupation and unresolved territorial disputes remain the defining challenges for Georgia's security and diplomacy. Consequently, whether or not the current Georgian government succeeds in resetting relations with Washington, Tbilisi's Iran policy is unlikely to undergo any fundamental reorientation from the course it followed before the Joe Biden administration suspended the strategic partnership.

The Gulf war adds another layer of complexity. Throughout the conflict, Iran demonstrated formidable missile and drone capabilities, repeatedly striking U.S. partner countries in the region and inflicting considerable infrastructural and financial damage. Even after the ceasefire, Iran has continued to target neighboring U.S.-aligned states and has issued warnings that others risk sharing their fate. This message was echoed by Iran's ambassador in Georgia, Seyed Ali Moujani, triggering a sharp public backlash; his Facebook page was briefly unavailable amid the controversy. The episode is a reminder that Georgian-Iranian tensions do not operate in a vacuum, and that the regional fallout from the Gulf war will continue to shape and constrain the options available to Tbilisi.

Conclusion

Georgia's "cold friendly" relationship with Iran is best read not as a policy preference but as a structural constraint — the residue of an unaltered security environment in which Russian occupation, contested territory, and limited diplomatic weight leave Tbilisi unable either to break cleanly with Tehran or to embrace it. Every apparent swing in that relationship has tracked external pressure rather than Georgian intent: when Washington pushed, Tbilisi conceded and absorbed a diplomatic cost; when its security needs reasserted themselves, ties with Iran quietly recovered. The pattern has held across three decades and three governments because the underlying conditions have not moved.

What has moved is the price of getting the balance wrong. The U.S.-Iran War has converted Iran from a difficult neighbor into a demonstrated regional striker, and the Iranian ambassador's warning in Tbilisi made clear that small states perceived to be enabling Washington are now treated as legitimate pressure points. That raises, rather than lowers, the value Tbilisi places on its "cold friendly" equilibrium — precisely the variable a U.S.-Georgia reset is most likely to demand be sacrificed.

The analytical implication for Washington is concrete. A reset built on the expectation that Tbilisi will downgrade ties with Tehran asks Georgia to assume retaliatory risk at the moment that risk is highest, and history suggests Georgia will comply only as far as its security margin allows before recalibrating. The durable version of any rapprochement is therefore one that decouples Washington's genuine interests in Georgia — corridor security, governance, resilience against Russian influence — from a demand for anti-Iran alignment. Whether the current opening becomes a reset or another short cycle of pressure and recovery will be the clearest test of whether Washington has learned that lesson.

Bako Kheladze is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Irregular Warfare Initiative, specializing in international relations and security studies, with a particular focus on Iran, the South Caucasus, and Eurasian geopolitics. He holds an M.A. in International Security Studies from the University of Leicester. Previously, he served as a Press Officer at the Embassy of Georgia to the Islamic Republic of Iran. He is fluent in Georgian, English, Persian, and Russian.

Uzbekistan's World Cup debut is no longer a prospect but a fact. In its first match at football's biggest tournament, it lost 3–1 to Colombia in Mexico City — a defeat, but not an empty one. Abbosbek Fayzullaev scored the country's first World Cup goal, briefly leveling the match before Colombia's experience told.

The road to that night ran through the 0–0 draw against the United Arab Emirates in June 2025, which secured direct qualification from Asia's final round and ended more than three decades of failed attempts since independence. But the result was never about one match, one coach or one golden generation. Uzbekistan did not suddenly discover football. It had talent, passionate crowds, clubs with history and youth teams with promise long before. What it lacked was a system strong enough to carry that talent to the world stage with any consistency.

That is the real significance of the breakthrough. The qualification is the headline; the system behind it is the story — Soviet inheritance, Pakhtakor's memory, the uneven institution-building of the post-independence years, opaque club financing, selection failures, prestige projects like Bunyodkor, and a recent push to make the game more organized, accountable and commercially viable. The achievement does not prove every problem is solved. It proves that football systems matter, and that Uzbekistan's has finally begun to deliver.

A Central Asian moment

The response was not confined to Uzbekistan. Across the region the qualification was treated as a shared achievement, with social media filling up with clips of fans from neighboring countries cheering the team, painting Uzbek flags on their faces and claiming it as Central Asia's own.

That enthusiasm was partly cultivated. According to information obtained by Turan Research Center from several sources familiar with the arrangements, Uzbek state-owned and private companies supported efforts to bring regional media figures and bloggers to the World Cup to cover the campaign for audiences at home. The sources said several Kyrgyz bloggers were offered such support, with some receiving free Uzbekistan Airways flights in exchange for promotional or media work. Turan could not independently verify every arrangement, but the pattern points to a deliberate effort to stage the debut as a regional event rather than a purely national one.

Central Asia usually reaches international audiences through energy, migration, Russia, China, security or borders. Football is a rarer kind of visibility, and the campaign to amplify it across the region was an exercise in soft power, not a spontaneous groundswell. A World Cup place puts Uzbekistan, and to some degree its neighbors, inside one of the few events watched by billions.

None of this makes Central Asia a single football culture. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan each have their own teams and rivalries. But the qualification crossed a line that had stayed shut since the Soviet collapse: a Central Asian side, for the first time, at the World Cup. Uzbekistan goes as a national team, and as the region's first football project to break through at this level.

Expansion helped — but Uzbekistan still earned it

The caveat is obvious: the 2026 World Cup grew to 48 teams, widening Asia's path. But that should not shrink the achievement to a technicality. Uzbekistan did not slip through a back door. It finished in the top two of its group and qualified directly, behind only Iran. Even under the format used for 2018 and 2022, the top two in each final group advanced automatically. The systems are not identical, so the comparison is imperfect, but the point holds: Uzbekistan earned a position that has long meant direct qualification. The expanded field opened the road; Uzbekistan still had to walk it.

The Soviet inheritance

Uzbek football did not start from a blank page in 1991. Much of what shaped the post-independence game was older than the state itself.

Soviet football was organized around institutions — ministries, industries, republics. CSKA was the army's club, Dynamo sides were tied to the security and police apparatus, Lokomotiv to the railways. Clubs were institutional flags as much as football teams, which made the game political from the start. Sport in the USSR was a demonstration of discipline, modernity and the prestige of the system. Moscow 24's history of the era describes how Dynamo grew out of a sports society linked to the security services, with branches in republican capitals, and how figures as powerful as Lavrentiy Beria attached themselves to football patronage and club rivalries.

For the republics, football also carried symbolic weight. Dynamo Kyiv, Dinamo Tbilisi, Ararat Yerevan, Neftchi Baku, Kairat Almaty and Pakhtakor Tashkent were not national teams, but they stood in for republican pride. A win over Moscow clubs, or a European run, could read as a statement about the republic itself — one of the few sanctioned ways for that pride to surface inside a Soviet frame.

Pakhtakor was Soviet Uzbekistan's football face in the Union. Its name — "cotton grower" — tied it to the republic's economic identity, and its stadium, colors and players became part of how the republic imagined itself in sport.

The inheritance cut both ways. It gave Uzbekistan football pride, stadium culture and a deep fan base, but it also entrenched patronage, institutional dependence and politicized sport, along with a familiar set of governance problems. Soviet football had its own history of informal deals, refereeing disputes and rigged results. Vedomosti, writing on the long campaign against draws, notes that by 1977 drawn matches had grown so common that officials publicly admitted hearing that some teams had stopped competing and were fixing outcomes by agreement; rather than address the cause, the authorities simply capped the number of permitted draws from 1978 to 1988. Sports.ru's archive of a 1982 coaching seminar shows discipline, refereeing, players' financial demands and match-fixing all discussed openly before the USSR ended, and another piece, drawing on coach German Zonin's recollections, describes fixing as a recurring problem alongside political pressure on individual results. These are historical testimony, not court records — but they show governance trouble was already baked into late Soviet football. It did not vanish in 1991; it was inherited, adapted and reproduced.

Pakhtakor and the memory of a lost generation

Pakhtakor remains the deepest symbol of that past. In August 1979, a plane carrying the team was destroyed in a mid-air collision over Soviet Ukraine, killing players and staff in one of the defining tragedies of Uzbek football. The damage outlasted the season. As the historian Ahror Safarov told Eurasianet, Uzbekistan lost not only great players but the coaches they would have become — a break in knowledge, mentorship and continuity that a still-consolidating football culture could ill afford.

Rumors and unofficial theories circulated afterward, as they did around many Soviet tragedies, but they do not displace the documented record. What endures is simpler: Pakhtakor became more than a club because it carried both the ambition of Soviet Uzbekistan and the grief of its loss. The patronage-and-prestige model it embodied proved just as durable after independence.

The post-independence system: ambition without stability

Independence did not cost Uzbek football its ambition. It had big clubs, loyal support, good players and several near-misses painful enough to sting. What it carried, like much of the former Soviet space, were structural weaknesses: club financing that leaned on patrons, state-linked sponsors or local authorities rather than commercial revenue; uneven governance; patchy youth development; and prestige projects that outran institution-building.

Bunyodkor was the clearest case. In the late 2000s it became one of Asia's most conspicuous football projects — bringing Rivaldo to Tashkent, hiring Zico and then Luiz Felipe Scolari, and drawing a level of attention almost no club in the region had managed. For a while it looked like modernization. But it also exposed the limit of the model: a club can buy stars; it cannot buy a sustainable ecosystem.

Foreign reporting tied Bunyodkor's rise to Zeromax, the opaque Swiss-registered conglomerate linked in several accounts to elite networks around Gulnara Karimova, who has consistently denied any connection to the company. The ownership and influence structures were hard to verify, which was part of the problem — the model ran on money and proximity to power rather than transparent football economics. When the structures around Zeromax collapsed, so did Bunyodkor's glamour, leaving unpaid-wage claims, legal disputes and debts from the Rivaldo and Denilson era; Rivaldo himself pursued millions in unpaid wages and fees, and the club was still working through the legacy years later.

Bunyodkor lifted Uzbekistan's profile and produced real players and memorable seasons. But it proved that prestige spending is not institution-building. The lasting question was never whether Tashkent could sign a famous player. It was whether the country could build clubs, academies and competitions that survived after the money and the political attention moved on.

Selection, trust and the talent Uzbekistan almost missed

A deeper problem has been selection — who gets seen, who gets promoted, who gets overlooked, and how far the system trusts its own judgment. Abdukodir Khusanov is the case in point. His move to Manchester City made him Uzbekistan's most visible export and gave the country a recognition it had never had in the Premier League era; for many abroad, he was the first Uzbek footballer they had heard of.

His route there was anything but smooth. Khusanov came through Bunyodkor's academy, but according to The Guardian, the club decided at 17 that he was not strong enough for the first-team path and offered him only a reserve place in the third division. He and his father looked elsewhere, which is how he reached Energetik-BGU in Belarus, then Lens, then City. This is not an indictment of one club — systems miss players everywhere — but it is a reminder that elite talent can slip through imperfect domestic filters. A player good enough for Manchester City had to leave through Belarus before anyone recognized his level.

That sets the real test for the system behind him: not whether it can produce one player good enough to be missed, but how many it can spot early, develop properly and keep visible without losing them abroad first.

Other failures have eroded trust. In 2016, Ozodlik reported the case of Ilyos Zeytullayev, who said his birth date had been altered when he was young and did not match his documents — and age manipulation distorts youth competition, undermines academies and makes merit-based selection harder to verify. More recent cases suggest the old habits persist but are handled differently now. In 2026, Uzbek media reported that the U-19 head coach at professional club Kyzylkumwas detained after allegedly demanding 20 million soms from a teenager born in 2008 for a place in the squad. The behavior was familiar; the public reporting and criminal handling were not. The same logic extends to match integrity, where Uzbekistan has introduced criminal liability for bribery and corruption involving participants and organizers of sports competitions. None of this means corruption has disappeared. It means fixing and sports bribery are now treated as legal and institutional threats rather than internal embarrassments.

The new generation

Khusanov is the most visible face of the new era, not the whole of it. This national team blends domestic football culture with serious professional exposure abroad. Eldor Shomurodov, Abbosbek Fayzullaev, Jaloliddin Masharipov, Otabek Shukurov and others have been shaped by foreign leagues and standards; FIFA listed Khusanov, Shomurodov and Fayzullaev among the headline names in the build-up, and Reuters cast Shomurodov and Khusanov as the squad's leading figures. Earlier Uzbek sides often had talent but lacked international rhythm. This generation has more players who know football outside the domestic system — Russia, Europe, Turkey, the Gulf — along with the dressing rooms, tactics and pressure that come with it.

The senior breakthrough rests on a deeper base. Uzbekistan won the AFC U-20 Asian Cup in 2023, reached the U-23 final and qualified for the Olympics for the first time in 2024, and took the U-17 Asian Cup in 2025. None of it guarantees lasting success, but it shows a pipeline broader than one golden generation. The World Cup will reshape the economics too: strong performances draw scouts and offers, and young players see a clearer route from local academies to foreign leagues. Khusanov proved the path exists. It is not yet systematic.

The reform turn: treating football as a system

The breakthrough follows a stretch of steadier state attention. Under Shavkat Mirziyoyev, football has been folded into the national development agenda rather than left as a scattering of clubs, and Reuters has tied the qualification to long-term investment in football schools, youth development, refurbished school grounds, mini-pitches and facilities. The official account goes further: in May 2026 Mirziyoyev said the country had expanded sports infrastructure, opened thousands of private clubs, built neighborhood grounds and launched schemes such as "Every mahalla — a football field," and that corruption and nepotism in football had been beaten. That is official narrative, not the full picture — independent assessments still treat corruption and nepotism as persistent features of Uzbek governance — but the underlying shift is real. Football now carries state-level priority, and that changes the environment players grow up in.

The same shift shows in financing, where the central contradiction of post-Soviet football has always been that clubs cannot become businesses while they survive on the expectation that a state company, governor or connected sponsor will cover the bills. Ozodlik reported in 2019 that the governor of Andijan levied what locals called a "football tax" on businesses and farmers to fund a local club. More recently, state companies have begun pulling out of non-core sponsorship — Uzbekneftegaz dropped Bunyodkor, Nasaf and Bukhara — while Super League clubs receive temporary state support that tapers from 35 billion soms per club in 2026 to 30 billion in 2027 and 25 billion in 2028, as the system moves toward private sponsorship and more independent management.

It is a real transition, if an incomplete one. Football is not commercially independent yet; the point is the direction — from obligation-based funding toward something more formal and eventually market-driven. A World Cup place can popularize the game but cannot make it profitable. Sustainability needs revenue from tickets, broadcasting, sponsorship, merchandise, academies and player sales; sponsors who see commercial value rather than political duty; and a domestic league fans trust enough to watch week to week. That is the next real test.

What comes after the breakthrough

Qualification does not close the story of Uzbek football; it opens the next chapter. The country has finally produced the result earlier generations chased and missed — the product of talent, a football-mad public, players seasoned abroad, sharper state attention and a genuine effort to confront old governance failures.

But the breakthrough sharpens a question it cannot answer by itself. A World Cup generates money, attention and political credit, and in Uzbek football those have historically flowed through patronage rather than institutions. The decisive test is not whether Uzbekistan can return to this stage, but whether the windfall is reinvested into academies, club finances and honest selection — or recaptured by the same logic that built Bunyodkor and then left it in debt. Khusanov had to be found in Belarus because the system nearly missed him at home. The breakthrough will have proven that system only when the next Khusanov no longer has to leave to be seen. Uzbekistan has reached the World Cup. Whether that becomes the foundation of a football economy, rather than the peak of another prestige cycle, is the question the celebration is postponing.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center, a Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute, an Expert at the N7 Foundation, and a Research Fellow at Bar Ilan University's Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

The collapse of the Aral Sea is one of the best-documented environmental disasters of the modern era. In the early 1960s it was the world's fourth-largest inland body of water, covering 67,500 square kilometres. Large-scale diversions from the Syr Darya and Amu Darya to irrigate cotton, rice, and other crops across Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan drained it within a generation. From the 1960s on, the sea broke into separate water bodies — broadly, the Small Aral (Northern) and the Great Aral (Southern) — and from there their fates diverged completely.

Most of the Great Aral is now salt desert; full restoration of the whole sea was recognised early on as unachievable. The Small Aral was different. It was saved — first by emergency dams, then by the World Bank–backed Kokaral Dam of 2005 — and Kazakhstan is now moving to consolidate that gain on three fronts: a second phase of dam works to raise the sea further, large-scale afforestation of the exposed bed, and water-sharing diplomacy with its upstream neighbours. Each of those efforts runs up against the same pressure — a Syr Darya whose flow is falling, with a new generation of upstream reservoirs poised to take more.

The sea continued shrinking through the 2000s, as imagery from NASA's Terra satellite documented. By 1989–1990, it had fully separated into the Great Aral and the Small Aral. The Small Aral kept receiving the Syr Darya's flow, while the Amu Darya stopped reaching the sea in the mid-1980s, sealing the fate of the Great Aral. Full restoration of the entire sea was recognized early on as unachievable in any foreseeable timeframe. But in the smaller northern basin, the water level has been rising since the early 1990s, driven by a positive balance between Syr Darya inflow and evaporative loss. That balance is the entire basis of the effort to save the Small Aral — and it is exactly what new upstream water use now threatens.

Not everything happening to the sea in those years was visible in satellite imagery or scientific papers. I recall the mid-1990s, when our office in Almaty was periodically visited by Zhannat Makhambetova, then head of the NGO Aral Tenizi, which supports fishermen in the Kazakh town of Aralsk. On each visit, she spoke with despair about a sea going lifeless and a fishing industry disappearing. By then, the only fish surviving in the Aral was the European flounder (Platichthys flesus); other species could not tolerate the rising salinity. In the Small Aral, salinity peaked at 30 grams per liter in the early 1990s, against 10 grams per litre in the 1960s — the product of falling water levels and evaporation.

Before the disaster, mid-century catches ran to several tens of thousands of tonnes a year, and the fishery employed roughly 60,000 people. The sea held 36 fish species, including 20 native ones; Soviet-era programs introduced a further 16 from other waters with mixed results. Most native and introduced freshwater fish died off once salinity reached 18 grams per liter in the 1980s. Commercial fishing effectively ceased in the mid-1990s, with catches falling to a few dozen tons a year — a thousandfold collapse.

In the late 1990s, the flounder offered a reprieve. Introduced from the Sea of Azov between 1979 and 1987, this salt-tolerant flatfish supported a catch exceeding 1,000 tons in 1999 and nearly 2,000 tonnes by 2007, becoming an unlikely symbol of hope for Aralsk's fishermen for two decades. As the Small Aral freshened after 2006, flounder ceased to be the dominant commercial species, giving way to freshwater zander, bream, carp, catfish, roach, perch, and pike. Between 2015 and 2023, catches averaged around 7,000 tons a year, most of it exported to Russia and Europe.

The recovery rested on engineering. Through the 1990s and 2000s, the level was raised and salinity cut by damming the former strait between the northern and southern basins and holding water in the Small Aral. The first structure, built in August 1992 from sand and reeds, required repeated repair, including reinforced-concrete work; in April 1999, a rise of more than three meters destroyed it outright. According to a World Bank report, the failure drove another sharp decline, with the 2004 catch falling to just 52 tons. The Small Aral was again under threat until the 12-kilometer Kokaral Dam was completed in August 2005 under the World Bank–financed Syr Darya Control and Northern Aral Sea Project (Phase I). The 2010 World Bank Implementation Status Results Report records the payoff: the level rose four meters; the shoreline advanced to within 35 kilometers of Aralsk by 2010, against 75 kilometres in 2001; the surface area grew to 3,300 square kilometers in 2009, from 2,400 in 2001; and salinity fell to under 10 grams per liter by August 2010, less than half its 2001 level.

The rescue has not only held but advanced. Over the past three years, coordinated releases along the Syr Darya channeled more than five billion cubic meters into the Northern Aral — a record 2.6 billion in 2024 alone — lifting its volume to roughly 23 billion cubic meters, a level the government's own Water Resources Management Concept had not expected to reach until the end of the decade. Volume is up some 42 percent over the period, and salinity has fallen close to fourfold.

Astana now intends to build on that. Under Phase II, again with World Bank support, the government plans to reconstruct the Kokaral Dam, raising it by two meters, and to add a new hydraulic facility near the village of Amanotkel to stabilize the Akshatau and Kamystybas lake systems. The works are designed to lift the Northern Aral's level to 44 meters (Baltic system), expand its surface to 3,913 square kilometers, and increase its volume from 23 to 34 cubic kilometers. A feasibility study has been prepared, completion is targeted for 2026–2029, and Prime Minister Olzhas Bektenov has instructed the water ministry to secure financing by the end of 2026; refilling to the new level is expected to take four to five years.

The harder part of the effort is diplomatic rather than engineering. The Northern Aral's recovery depends entirely on what reaches it down the Syr Darya, and that flow is governed upstream by Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and above all Uzbekistan, which consumes the bulk of the river's usable water. The recent inflow gains were possible only through coordinated reservoir operation across the basin and adherence to interstate allocation agreements. In a notable step, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan last year signed an agreement on the joint management and rational use of transboundary water bodies — the institutional foundation on which any further recovery of the Small Aral now rests.

Yet that foundation is shifting. Alarming reports are again emerging from the Kazakh side of the Aral. Local reporting describes the Small Aral drying, water turning saltier, and catches falling, by some accounts to around 4,000 tons a year over the past two years, even as the Ministry of Water Resources reports annual catches near 8,000 tons. The discrepancy itself is telling: aggregate official figures and the lived experience of specific fishing communities are diverging. The deeper pressure is not in dispute. The Syr Darya's flow has fallen sharply since 2019, and the Institute of Geography and Water Security forecasts a further reduction of two cubic kilometers in the Aral–Syr Darya basin by 2030. The planned Kambarata-1 hydropower plant compounds the risk: its reservoir on the Naryn, the Syr Darya's largest tributary, would hold roughly 4.56 cubic kilometers and further constrain downstream flow through 2030 and beyond. The same coordinated diplomacy that refilled the sea will now have to defend it against more reservoirs and less water — a far harder task than building a dam.

While the north was saved, the bulk of the sea — 54,000 to 57,000 square kilometерs depending on the year, of which roughly 20,000 lie in Kazakhstan — became a salt desert. Salt had accumulated in the Aral over millions of years; for four to five decades, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides drained into it from irrigated farmland. As the water retreated, these settled onto the exposed bed. Estimates put 107 to 114 billion tons of salt on the dried seabed. Each year, winds lift up to 80 million tons of salt and chemicals from the Aralkum, carrying them across Central Asia and, in documented cases, as far as the glaciers of the Tien Shan and the Himalayas, harming human health, ecosystems, and farmland. The Aralkum has become a leading regional source of dust storms and long-range pollutant transport.

Efforts to halt desertification on the dried bed date to 1980, when planting in the drained Rybatsky and Moinak bays in Uzbekistan proved effective. Uzbekistan continued planting shrubs through the mid-2010s across more than 3,500 square kilometers. Since the late 2010s, both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have pursued large-scale green belts to arrest desertification and transboundary dust transport. Between 2018 and 2025, Uzbekistan worked across roughly 20,000 square kilometers; between 2021 and 2025, Kazakhstan planted some 11,000 square kilometers. The species used include saxaul (Haloxylon), Richter's saltwort (Xylosalsola richteri), Calligonum caput-medusae Schrenk, and tamarisk (Tamarix). Together these plantings now cover more than half the dried bed — though area planted is not the same as area stabilized: Kazakh authorities put saxaul survival at around 30 percent, and it remains premature to judge the green belts' durability.

The Aral disaster ranks among the gravest environmental challenges Central Asia faces, and arguably one of the gravest anywhere. Much of the sea is gone, and its communities have endured decades of hardship. The north survives — but its future, including the fishery and the coastal economy that depends on it, now turns on a single variable the rescue cannot control: how much of the Syr Darya reaches it. Climate change and a new generation of upstream reservoirs are both pulling that number down. The lesson of the Small Aral is not that the sea was saved, but that the saving is conditional and reversible — a gain that must be defended upstream, in water-sharing agreements and reservoir-operating rules, or lost again. The first rescue bought time. Whether the region uses it will be decided on the Naryn and the Syr Darya, not at Kokaral.

Vadim Ni is an environmental lawyer and the Director of the Socio-Ecological Fund in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

On June 7, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party won the country’s parliamentary elections with just under 50 percent of the vote, enough under Armenia’s electoral system to govern alone with a comfortable majority. The nearest challenger, the Strong Armenia bloc fronted by Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan, trailed near 23 percent, and every opposition force that cleared the threshold campaigned on some version of repairing ties with Moscow. Civil Contract cast the vote as a choice between a return to Russia’s orbit and a more independent Armenia drawn toward the West, and the electorate sided with the latter. Yet the win alone will not seal Armenia’s fate. The country must still pass the constitutional change widely seen as the final barrier to normalization with Azerbaijan and Turkey, and Pashinyan’s victory does not mean Russia will quietly concede a country it has dominated for two centuries.

Read the full article on the Central Asia Caucasus Institute.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

Only two people in Turkmenistan, the chairman of the Halk Maslahaty (People’s Council) and the president, have what could be considered job security.

Everyone else is expendable, at a moment’s notice, and that extends to the country’s top clergy.

Turkmenistan has replaced the country’s top mufti, and while the reasons for the sudden move are not clear, the removal process is very familiar for Turkmenistan.

Frantic Friday

On June 19, the mufti of all Turkmenistan, Yalkap Hojagulyyev, led Friday prayers at the Turkmenbashi Ruhy Mosque in Gypjak, some 11 kilometers from the capital, Ashgabat.

Saparmurat “Turkmenbashi” Niyazov was Turkmenistan’s first president. The country’s compliant parliament and Halk Maslahaty bestowed the title of “Turkmenbashi,” meaning head of the Turkmen, on Niyazov.

Gypjak was Niyazov’s home village, and when he was alive, he spent $100 million building a mosque that could accommodate 10,000 worshipers. After he died in late 2006, he was laid to rest at the nearby mausoleum built specially for him and his family.

The June 19 Friday prayers were attended by a special visitor, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who also paid his respects at Niyazov’s mausoleum.

Read the full article on The Times of Central Asia.

Bruce Pannier is a Senior Fellow at the Turan Research Center.

Conventional wisdom holds that a country guards its independence by holding its ground, and that to surrender a claim to a part of its imagined territory, even one outside its control, is to surrender a part of its sovereignty. This attitude helps to explain the dozens of ongoing territorial disputes across the world—Venezuela’s desire for the Essequibo region of Guyana, dueling Indian and Pakistani claims to Kashmir, and the controversy around China’s “nine-dash line” in the South China Sea, among others—and why they are so intractable.

Armenia is no stranger to this view. For decades, it vigorously defended its claim to the Nagorno-Karabakhregion, an ethnic Armenian enclave within the internationally-recognized territory of Azerbaijan. Even after the enclave, known as the Republic of Artsakh, fell to an Azerbaijani offensive in 2023, Armenian politicians railed against Azerbaijan and vowed to liberate the territory from Baku’s control in a future conflict.

But this attitude has its limits. After Armenia lost the war, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan recognized that for Armenia—a small state wedged between far larger powers—an unwinnable claim could also become the mechanism by which his nation’s sovereignty was lost, and sought to win long-term peace in the south Caucasus by giving up Armenia’s claim to Nagorno-Karabakh. The deeper meaning of Pashinyan’s reelection on June 7 is a vote of confidence from the Armenian people in this approach—and a reward for Pashinyan’s remarkable personal courage in pursuing it.

Read the full article on The National Interest.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.

The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has placed Pakistan in a particularly difficult position. When Islamabad signed a strategic mutual defense agreement with Saudi Arabia in September 2025, just days after Qatar came under Israeli attack, the pact was seen as a response to Israel’s military dominance and a shattered perception of U.S. security guarantees. It also suggested that Saudi Arabia could possibly enjoy Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella, though this has not been confirmed. Both sides have purposefully maintained strategic ambiguity regarding what role Pakistan’s armed forces and its nuclear arsenal could play in a military emergency.

The agreement was tested when Iran began launching missiles and drones against Saudi Arabia February 28, prompting questions as to why it didn’t trigger the mutual defense clause. Instead, Pakistan chose a diplomatic track, working alongside Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia to mediate between Washington and Tehran. In Pakistan’s thinking, siding overtly with Saudi Arabia would complicate Pakistan’s close but occasionally tense relations with Iran. At the same time, Pakistan relies deeply on foreign investments, and Saudi Arabia has played a central role propping up the country’s economy.

Read the full article at The Arab Gulf States Institution.

Emil Avdaliani is a Research Fellow at the Turan Research Center.