President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has announced a new Investors’ Council for the fuel and energy sector, to be led by Saida Mirziyoyeva, head of the Presidential Administration, after international energy companies cited persistent bureaucratic obstacles to project delivery.
Uzbekistan has quietly built one of Central Asia’s largest rosters of naturalized Russian athletes, spanning rowing, tennis, figure skating, swimming and fencing. The strategy delivers medals but raises hard questions about what it costs domestic talent and the sports budgets meant to develop it.
The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank has signed two grant agreements totaling USD 1.1 million with Azerbaijan to fund early-stage feasibility work on the Caspian Green Energy Corridor, a cross-border project that would connect Uzbekistan’s power grid to Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan through a proposed 400-kilometre submarine electricity cable.
President Shavkat Mirziyoyev signed legislation imposing life imprisonment for sexual violence against children under 14, as the government simultaneously announced a 30% rise in heating tariffs, dismissed the defense minister, reshuffled four Tashkent district governors, and arrested a deputy district governor for a $25,000 bribe.
Turkmengaz has halted natural gas deliveries to Russia’s Gazprom following a breakdown in price negotiations, ending a five-year supply arrangement that had delivered 5.5 billion cubic metres annually. The head of the Turkmen state concern says commercial talks are continuing, while Ashgabat simultaneously pursues a fourth pipeline branch toward China.
The Competition Committee reviewed 878 draft regulatory acts submitted through the government’s unified legislative portal in 2025 and found that 425 — nearly half — contained provisions contradicting competition law. The rate was highest for Presidential-level acts, where 147 of 239 drafts, or 61.5%, were flagged.
The Migration Agency under the Cabinet of Ministers has urged Uzbek citizens engaged in temporary labor activity in Russia to regularize their legal status no later than September 10, 2025, following a decree by the President of the Russian Federation extending the original deadline.
An expanded presidential meeting on October 27 set a GDP target of $135 billion and ordered a new budget monitoring system for 22 ministries and local administrations, as the economy grew 7.6% in the first nine months of the year — well ahead of forecast.
A visually impaired resident of Karakul district identified and refused a 10 million soum cash demand linked to a land subsidy application after listening to an audio guide on anti-corruption law — the first practical test of a legal literacy project that has since reached more than 40,000 people across Uzbekistan.
A joint study by UNDP and the Anti-Corruption Agency, presented at a Tashkent roundtable on 25 May 2026, found that healthcare and education are the sectors where women are most exposed to corruption, while nearly 70% of respondents linked informal social practices to the spread of corrupt behaviour.
A regional round table convened in Tashkent on 29 November 2022 brought together police, prosecutors and legal educators from four Central Asian countries to examine how corruption and institutional shortcomings obstruct the protection of women and girls from violence.
A large-scale study completed in Nukus on 7 May 2025 has produced two new analytical tools for monitoring dust migration across the Southern Aral Sea region and, for the first time, quantified in digital terms how vegetation cover on the drained sea bed reduces salt removal.
