President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev returned from Brussels on 23 June with a substantial package: an aviation agreement, concluded visa and readmission negotiations, fresh road and mineral commitments, and commercial agreements and memoranda that Astana put at more than $12 billion. The single largest item was an Air Astana aircraft order valued at €7.145 billion. The deals are real and the direction is positive. The harder question is what happens between the signing ceremony and delivery, because the value of this partnership now depends on the stability of the routes and the states that sit between Astana and Brussels.
Connectivity is the spine of the relationship
Almost every governmental and commercial outcome of the visit traces back to one theme. Under the Global Gateway framework, the European Investment Bank agreed to lend up to 150 million euros (US$170 million) to the Kazakh National Road Company to upgrade roads along the Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor, alongside four Middle Corridor agreements worth a combined $462 million. The Horizontal Aviation Agreement, concluded after more than two decades of talks, opens service between Kazakhstan and 17 member states. The relationship these agreements serve is large but narrow. EU goods trade with Kazakhstan reached 41.4 billion euros (US$47 billion) in 2025, yet fuel and mining products made up 92 percent of Kazakh exports to the bloc. Kazakhstan supplied close to 13 percent of the EU’s crude oil imports and around 40 percent of the world’s uranium. Broadening that base is the strategic prize, and it runs along a corridor that passes through some of the most volatile ground in Eurasia.
Central Asia as facilitator in a fragmenting Eurasia
The northern overland route through Russia and Belarus, long the default land bridge between China and the EU, is closing as a reliable option, and the trend sharpened in June 2026. On 20 June, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy issued an ultimatum to Minsk to remove border installations used to guide Russian strikes on Ukraine, warning that Kyiv would disable them by force within a week. Belarus opened mobilization drills near the Ukrainian border the same week, and Russian and Belarusian officials blamed Ukraine for a drone strike on a bus in a Russian border area, a claim Kyiv rejected as a provocation. Western and Russian officials told The Wall Street Journal that Moscow has begun a pressure campaign to draw Belarus further into the war. Most analysts judge a full Belarusian entry or a new ground front unlikely for now, and Lukashenko publicly refuses direct involvement, yet the more probable path is gradual escalation and incident risk that is hard to read and harder to insure.
That trajectory carries a direct freight consequence. Poland has repeatedly sealed its Belarus border, closing it entirely during the Zapad 2025 exercises and suspending ten crossings in January 2026, with insurers now charging risk premiums on any freight that transits Belarus. Each escalation pushes cargo off the northern route and onto the Trans-Caspian Middle Corridor through Kazakhstan, where volumes have risen more than fivefold in seven years, from 0.8 million to roughly 4.5 million tons, with container volume climbing about 36 percent in 2025. Carnegie analysts trace the post-2022 surge directly to the rerouting of cargo away from Russia.
A second pressure point is forming to the southwest. On 24 June, Romania’s Chamber of Deputies adopted a bill on union with Moldova, submitted by the fringe SOS Romania party and passed not by a plenary vote but through a tacit-approval rule after the constitutional 45-day deadline lapsed, over negative opinions from the government and from the chamber’s legal and human-rights committees. The text is symbolic, faces an uncertain path in the Senate, and sits against a government-level position in which no unification process exists. Its significance is contextual. Roughly 1,500 Russian troops remain in Transnistria, Moldova’s compromised territorial integrity keeps it outside NATO, and Chisinau is circulating a reintegration plan to Western partners. Any deeper drawing of Moldova into the Western security umbrella would place Russian forces against allied territory, with escalation potential along the same flank that feeds the Black Sea end of the corridor.
This is where Central Asia, and Kazakhstan in particular, acquires a role beyond transit. The region has become the ground where commercial links among Western, Russian, and Chinese firms continue to function when direct channels close. Kazakhstan’s national railway recently signed an agreement with a Chinese counterpart to manage cargo from China even as it courts European shippers on the same route. Tokayev’s itinerary, with Moscow in May, Turkiye in April, and Washington in February, reflects the same posture. Astana keeps every channel open and positions itself as a facilitator of dialogue among parties that increasingly struggle to speak to each other directly. For the EU, that facilitation gains value precisely as the alternatives narrow.
The Middle Corridor runs through other states’ crises
The route absorbing this diverted traffic is itself exposed at points outside Kazakhstan’s control. It crosses the Caspian by ferry, depends on Azerbaijani and Georgian transit, and feeds into Turkiye and onward to European ports. Each segment carries its own risk, and the most serious is physical. The Caspian’s water level has been falling by up to 30 centimeters a year since 2020, driven by warming and by Russia’s regulation of the Volga, which supplies around 80 percent of the sea’s inflow. That decline has already cut rail tank car ferry transport by 22 percent and wagon transport by 10 percent on the Baku-Kuryk route, the modes on which critical mineral shipments depend. Kazakhstan is dredging at Aktau and Kuryk to compensate. On the far shore, Georgia has slashed funding for the planned Anaklia deep-water port, the corridor’s only deep-sea gateway to Europe, while the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway is running at physical capacity, with kilometer-long queues during recent demand spikes. Instability at southern maritime chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz reinforces the same pressure, concentrating still more weight on the western route as Europe leans on it.
This is the analytical core of what Nightingale Int. calls Geo-Connectivity. Vulnerability sits in the structure of overlapping networks rather than in any single shock, and external events reach Central Asia through intermediary states rather than directly. Carnegie analysts reach a compatible conclusion, describing the Middle Corridor as a window of opportunity to be used strategically rather than a permanent pathway to European markets. The implication for the EU-Kazakhstan relationship is that its resilience depends on the stability of third countries neither party controls. That argues for a standing strategic dialogue on which routes to use under which conditions, and for contingency mechanisms tied to specific scenarios, from a shallower Caspian to a wider war in either theater. Such planning is weaker when it excludes the firms that move the cargo. Political-risk assessment for the corridor should draw directly on private Central Asian operators, who hold ground-level knowledge of routing and bottlenecks that no ministry or distant analyst can fully reproduce.
From announcement to delivery
Announcements continue to outpace verifiable delivery, and the gap is worth tracking honestly. The proposal to place Kazakh airports and seaports under European management, first floated in 2024 when Astana offered to hand 22 airports and the Caspian ports of Aktau and Kuryk to European operators, has now produced its first concrete step. In Brussels, Tokayev discussed the long-term development of Almaty International Airport with Groupe ADP, the Paris operator that already built the airport’s new terminal and is working toward a capacity of 55 million passengers by 2050, with regional airports under discussion. On the maritime side, talks with MSC over the Caspian ports, and cooperation agreements involving A.P. Moller-Maersk and Damen Shipyards, point the same way, though management contracts remain to be signed.
The critical raw materials picture is similarly uneven. The Western projects that have actually advanced sit in a short list. In Tajikistan, the Anzob operation owned by the United States firm Comsup Commodities remains the country’s sole antimony extractor after some $300 million invested over fifteen years, although most national output still flows to China and Russia. In Kazakhstan, the Sarytogan graphite deposit, held by an ASX-listed developer, holds EU strategic-project status and carries a European Bank for Reconstruction and Development stake of 18.4 percent, with a definitive feasibility study due in mid-2026. Tungsten is the project that might advance furthest, though it remains a possibility rather than a producing asset. A joint venture between Cove Kaz Capital and Tau-Ken Samruk aims to develop the Northern Katpar and Upper Kairakty deposits, and United States agencies have signaled letters of interest of up to $1.6 billion. The financing is not yet committed, a feasibility study is still pending, and any output lies years away. Against these, the German lithium project in East Kazakhstan has gone quiet. HMS Bergbau’s planned $500 million development at the Akhmetkino deposit remains at the geological exploration stage with no construction, more than a year after its announcement. Reserves still have to be confirmed before the headline figure means anything.
A national-security lens, not a quarterly one
The tungsten case points to what European and Western firms could learn from Washington. The United States is treating tungsten as a security question rather than a commercial one. The Export-Import Bank and the Development Finance Corporation have signaled letters of interest covering direct loans, guarantees, buyer credits, and political-risk insurance, instruments that could lower the cost of capital enough for a mid-tier private miner to compete with Chinese state-backed rivals, without public ownership of the asset. European institutions already hold equity in projects such as Sarytogan, so the instruments exist. Extending them to loan guarantees and political-risk cover for mid-sized European miners would let Brussels compete for assets that pure commercial logic, judged on quarterly returns, would cede to better-financed competitors. Strategic autonomy in raw materials is bought with patient capital and risk-sharing, and that case has to be made to corporate boards, not only to governments.
Reform is the price of durable capital
Kazakhstan carries its own share of the work. Continued reform of the investment climate is what converts memoranda into durable capital, and the country should not assume it is the only strategically important supplier on the board. The market is crowded. According to Oxus Society data cited by The Diplomat, China absorbs just under half of Central Asia’s critical mineral exports and Russia roughly one-fifth, while the EU accounts for 6.4 percent and the United States for 2.1 percent. Kazakhstan stands out on reserves, which the World Bank values in the trillions, but less so on the transport capacity to move bulk material westward or on the regulatory consistency that long-term investors price in. Logistics economics still decides many of these projects, which is why even a promising graphite developer anchors itself to a domestic rail operator to reach the market. Closing the distance between reserve wealth and reliable delivery is the larger task ahead.
The signing was the easy part
The Brussels visit moved capital and closed agreements, and it confirmed Kazakhstan as the EU’s central partner in the region. The constraint is that the corridor and the relationship both depend on factors outside the room where the documents were signed: the stability of third states, the level of the Caspian, the trajectory of two wars, and the willingness of private capital to take strategic risk. Kazakhstan’s value as a facilitator in a fragmenting Eurasia, and the diverted freight already arriving on the Middle Corridor, are the opportunity. Turning these signatures into a resilient partnership means building shock-resistance into the route and the rules, with the firms that actually run the corridor in the room. That is the work that begins now.
The author is Eldaniz Gusseinov, a co-founder and head of research at Nightingale Int.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of The Astana Times.
