Over two days in Turkmenistan’s Avaza resort area, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev took part in high-level meetings. On Oct. 8, the eighth Consultative Meeting of the Heads of State of Central Asia convened for the first time with Azerbaijan as a full participant.
On Oct. 9, the CIS Council of Heads of State and the first Caspian Environmental Summit followed, part of a diplomatic week that Ashgabat presented as a showcase of its chairmanship. The 8th Consultative Meeting of Heads of State of Azerbaijan and Central Asia.
Photo credit: Press service of President of the Republic of Azerbaijan. Such trips are usually described through the lens of balanced diplomacy, with Astana balancing its neighbors, Moscow and Tehran. That framing holds, yet it explains little about why Kazakhstan needs so many platforms with overlapping membership, and why a president who regularly criticizes multilateral institutions for weak results keeps investing political capital in them.
The answer becomes clearer through the logic of Geo-Connectivity. In this framework, the resilience of a country’s external economic ties rests on four elements, namely goods, demand, infrastructure and the ability to secure access to that infrastructure. The first three create an economic link.
Three platforms, three systems of dependence Each meeting in Avaza corresponds to a distinct geographic system through which Kazakhstan connects to world markets. The Consultative Meeting with Azerbaijan covers the western direction and the intraregional system.
It includes the critical nodes of the Middle Corridor, the ports of Aktau and Kuryk on the Kazakh shore and Baku on the opposite one. Allen Alekeyev (L). Photo credit: KIOGE Forum 2026. Tokayev proposed discussing, at expert level, the integration of the Middle Corridor with the TRIPP route through Armenia, and he cited a World Bank estimate that cargo flows across the Caspian could quadruple by 2040.
He also listed the domestic projects meant to feed this route with cargo. The Moiynty-Kyzylzhar and Darbaza-Maktaaral lines are nearing completion, the Bakhty-Ayagoz section is scheduled to open in 2027, and work has started on the Aral-Caspian mainline. Regional observers described his speech as a combination of infrastructure planning and candid criticism of regional governance.
The CIS meeting serves the northern system. Most of Kazakhstan’s oil exports pass through Russian territory and ports. In 2025, 64.8 million of Kazakhstan’s 78.7 million tons of oil exports moved through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, and disruptions in 2026 forced a downward revision of the production plan.
Good relations with Moscow do not fully insure this node, yet without a regular channel of dialogue Astana cannot manage the risks attached to it. Tokayev therefore used the same Avaza speech to reaffirm the importance of the North-South corridor. The CIS session brought together nine leaders of the Commonwealth and, for the first time in the organization’s history, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was invited to its expanded session.
The leaders planned to adopt a statement on the 35th anniversary of the CIS and documents on law enforcement, cultural and information cooperation and foreign policy coordination.