The long arm of Turkmenistan

So let's begin again with Russia.

I'm afraid it is a perennial actor in our podcasts, which nothing against Russia per se, but we should really be talking about Central Asia.

But Russia is obviously the central participant in this drama.

As people who have been following the news about what's going on there will know, Ukrainian armed forces have been very systematically targeting refinery capacity in Russia.

As a result, as of a few days ago, Radio Free Europe was reporting that, and I suspect the number has grown since that time, at least 55 of Russia's 83 regions have been reporting refinery.

fuel shortages or introducing sales restrictions.

So you hear a lot of stories about long queues at gas stations or sometimes gas stations not selling any fuel at all.

And this is a problem that now, I think for a while, I think the Russian government was inclined to ignore it.

But I think even the president, Vladimir Putin, is now acknowledging the problem.

He's saying the government is going to do everything they can to minimize the consequences of it.

But yeah, it doesn't seem like the crisis is going to go away anytime soon.

soon the question we have for this podcast is really what if anything this means for kazakhstan

yeah i also saw videos all over social media which are not that accessible in russia by the way but still you know with all this informational coverage you just can't ignore the problem so russians are especially from neighboring areas with the kazakhstan coming to our cities to fuel their and I'm talking here about individuals, but there is one more story which we discussed before the recording, is how the logistic companies change the routes of their trucks so to come in and fuel at the Kazakh station that is increasing the cost of transportation quite a lot.

If I'm not wrong, like something about $700 per one route.

So the concern

here is that Kazakhstan, now look, I mean, when I worked as a journalist in Kazakhstan about 15 years ago, it's a long time now, I recall that back in the day, even in Almaty, there were times when the government introduced this, what they call a talon system, so you could actually only buy gas for your car, gasoline, petrol.

whatever you want to call it, for your car with a coupon.

So you'd have to go to the petrol station, and unless you presented this coupon, you couldn't buy this, you know, you couldn't fill your tank with petrol.

Now, these coupons are in Kazakhstan relatively now distant memory.

Kazakhstan doesn't quite experience shortages in that way, or certainly not the way that Russia is now experiencing shortages.

That having been said, Kazakhstan, although it's an oil-rich country, As we all know, it's not a country that is exactly awash in ability to produce its own gasoline.

So Kazakhstan has three refineries in various parts of the country.

These are old refineries, which are in constant need of maintenance, of refurbishment.

They were all built in Soviet times.

There's long, long decades been promises of building a fourth big refinery, but this never seems to happen.