After a phone call between Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin on April 17, the presidential administration confirmed that Tokayev will attend the upcoming Victory Day Parade in Moscow. Tokayev has attended the event in recent years. While Kazakhstan has not held a May 9 parade since 2019, the government plans to do so this year.
Tokayev met on April 15 with Nikolay Podguzov, the Eurasian Development Bank chairman, to discuss investment opportunities in the country’s energy facilities. In 2024, the EDB invested around $1.4 billion into Kazakhstan’s economy. Most of the investment for 2025 is earmarked for the modernization of heat and electricity infrastructure.
A new law signed by Tokayev on April 15 bans the financing of foreign athletes through budgetary and quasi-public sector funds. Through the introduction of a “national standards for sports training,” the new law provides measures to “strengthen traditional values and patriotic education.”
Kazakhstan’s Senate approved on April 17 a bill to create a free trade zone that would also include Uzbekistan. Kazakhstan is already a member of the World Trade Organization and the Eurasian Economic Union. With the new free trade agreement encompassing the whole Commonwealth of Independent States, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan will do away with a number of commercial barriers.
The Almaty city administration rejected a request by a group of crane operators to hold a protest rally on April 20. The group had come together in recent months after an accident involving 53-year-old crane operator Arman Akilzhanova from Astana. Holding rallies in Kazakhstan involves a number of bureaucratic hurdles, something that the International Labor Organization has criticized because it interferes with the principle of freedom of assembly.
Kazakhstan’s lower chamber of Parliament passed on April 16 a bill to establish a new law strengthening government control over university endowments. Science and education minister Sayasat Nurbek said that some of the largest endowments, among which Nazarbayev University and Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools, will be excluded from the new regulation. [Read more here.]
The East Kazakhstan Regional Court sentenced on April 16 Anatoly Balushkin and Yerik Sagymbaev, former top managers at major car assembly plant Asia-Bipek Auto, in absentia for fraud and tax evasion. They each received sentences of 9 and 8.5 years respectively. According to press reports from 2022, Balushkin had allegedly been detained in Prague.
In preparation for the typical seasonal forest fires, the ministry of ecology said on April 15 that nine regional administrations and the Semey Ormany reserve are “not ready” to face the upcoming threats. Two years ago, massive forest fires rampaged across Semey Ormany and damaged more than 3,000 hectares of the reserve and led to the death of 14 emergency workers.
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