Kazakhstan, Russia and China — the ethnic Russian north, treaties and frameworks, trade, crude export routes and the Middle Corridor

This article follows the overview of Kazakhstan and turns to the country’s relations with its two large neighbours, Russia and China. Kazakhstan shares a 7,591 km border with Russia to the north and west and a 1,783 km border with China to the east (1), and in 2025 it obtained 29.7% of its goods imports from Russia and 29.2% from China (2). Besides diplomatic choice, these relationships are constrained by conditions that are hard to change: where people live, the length of the borders and the layout of transport routes. Within those constraints, the Kazakh government has pursued “multi-vector” diplomacy, maintaining relations with several great powers at the same time (3). The sections below examine, in turn, the ethnic Russian population of the north, the treaties and institutions that bind Kazakhstan to Russia, the path from border settlement with China to the “Silk Road Economic Belt”, trade with both countries, the dependence of crude oil exports on routes through Russia, and the reasons why the trans-Caspian route (the Middle Corridor) grew after 2022. All figures are taken from published sources accessed on 19 October 2026.

Table 1 first sets out the main milestones in relations with the two countries.

Table 1. Main milestones in relations with Russia and China

Year	Relations with Russia	Relations with China
1992	Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance (25 May) (4)	Diplomatic relations established (3 January) (5)
1994	President Nazarbayev proposes a “Eurasian Union” in a lecture at Moscow State University (29 March) (6)(7)	Border agreement (signed in Almaty on 26 April; in force 11 September 1995) (8)
1997	—	China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) acquires about 60% of Aktobemunaigas (9)
2001	Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) founded (15 June, Shanghai); both are founding members (10)	As left
2002	—	Treaty of Good-Neighbourliness, Friendship and Cooperation (23 December) (11)
2005	State border treaty (signed in Moscow on 18 January; in force 12 January 2006) (12)	Strategic partnership (July) (5); agreed acquisition of PetroKazakhstan by a CNPC subsidiary announced (August) (13)
2006	—	First crude arrives on the Chinese side through the Atasu–Alashankou oil pipeline (July) (14)
2009	—	Inauguration of the Central Asia–China gas pipeline (December) (15)
2011	—	Comprehensive strategic partnership (5)
2013	Treaty on Good-Neighbourliness and Alliance in the 21st Century (signed in Yekaterinburg on 11 November; in force 22 December 2014) (16)	President Xi Jinping proposes the “Silk Road Economic Belt” at Nazarbayev University (7 September) (17)
2015	Treaty on the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) enters into force (1 January) (18)	China and Russia issue a joint statement on “aligning” the Belt with the EAEU (8 May) (19)
2016	—	Document signed on aligning the Belt with Kazakhstan’s “Nurly Zhol” (Bright Path) new economic policy (2 September) (20)
2019	—	“Permanent comprehensive strategic partnership” (5)
2022	Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) troops deployed during the January unrest and withdrawn by the 19th of that month (21)	—
2023	—	Mutual visa-exemption agreement enters into force (November) (5)

With Russia, treaty and alliance frameworks accumulated from the first years of independence. With China, relations began with border settlement and military confidence-building in the 1990s, passed through upstream oil investments and pipeline construction from the late 1990s, and in the 2010s brought economic connectivity to the fore within the framework of the Belt and Road. This difference runs through each of the sections below.

The ethnic Russian population of the north

According to the 2021 census, 2.9819 million Russians live in Kazakhstan, 15.5% of the population. The previous census in 2009 counted 3.7938 million (23.7%), so the number fell by 811,800, or 21.4%, in twelve years (22). Russians nonetheless remain the second-largest ethnic group after Kazakhs, and their distribution is highly uneven. Table 2 shows the share of Russians in each region’s population and each region’s share of all Russians in the country.

Table 2. Russian population by region and city (2021 census)

Region or city (2021 boundaries)	Population	Of whom Russians	Share of the region’s population	Share of all Russians in Kazakhstan
North Kazakhstan Region	540,800	240,600	44.5%	8.1%
Kostanay Region	833,600	280,600	33.7%	9.4%
East Kazakhstan Region (including today’s Abai Region)	1,341,300	431,000	32.1%	14.5%
Pavlodar Region	756,800	223,700	29.6%	7.5%
Karaganda Region (including today’s Ulytau Region)	1,348,500	391,700	29.0%	13.1%
Akmola Region	783,000	210,800	26.9%	7.1%
Almaty city	2,030,300	415,700	20.5%	13.9%
West Kazakhstan Region	675,700	109,200	16.2%	3.7%
Nur-Sultan city (now Astana)	1,234,000	118,400	9.6%	4.0%
Kyzylorda Region	814,900	12,300	1.5%	0.4%
Turkistan Region	2,054,000	27,900	1.4%	0.9%
Kazakhstan	19,186,000	2,981,900	15.5%	100%

Source: the author’s calculations from the 2021 census population by region and ethnicity (22). The boundaries are those at the time of the census, before Abai Region was separated from East Kazakhstan, Ulytau from Karaganda and Zhetysu from Almaty Region in 2022 (23).

North Kazakhstan is the only region where Russians outnumber Kazakhs (37.6%) (22). Taken together, the six northern, eastern and central regions (North Kazakhstan, Kostanay, East Kazakhstan, Pavlodar, Karaganda and Akmola) are home to 1.7783 million Russians, 59.6% of all Russians in the country, who make up 31.7% of the population of those six regions (the author’s calculation). Almaty, the former capital, follows with 415,700. In Turkistan and Kyzylorda in the south, by contrast, Russians account for less than 2% of the population.

This distribution, and the multi-ethnic make-up of the Russian-speaking population of the north, are the result of overlapping population movements and population losses. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, more than 1.5 million migrants from European Russia, mostly Russians and Ukrainians, settled the steppe. The famine of the early 1930s killed about 1.5 million people; more than a third of all Kazakhs perished, and Kazakhs became a minority in their own republic (24). This was a fall in the Kazakh denominator of the ratio. From the late 1930s into the 1940s, Chechens, Ingush, Karachais, Kurds and others were forcibly deported to Kazakhstan from across the Soviet Union (25). These people were not Russians. Even in the 2021 census, however, 65.8% of Germans, 58.4% of Koreans and 80.1% of Ukrainians gave a language other than that of their own nationality as their native language (the tabulation does not say which language) (22). During the war with Germany, factories were evacuated to Kazakhstan from European Russia; estimates of their number range from 110 to more than 300, depending on the period and scope counted (26). Then the Virgin Lands campaign, launched in 1954, turned steppe, mainly in northern Kazakhstan and the Altai region of the Russian republic, into farmland; across the campaign as a whole, the Komsomol (the Communist youth league) recruited more than 300,000 people, primarily from Ukraine and the Russian republic (27).

After independence, in 1997, the capital was moved from Almaty in the south to Akmola in the north, which was renamed Astana the following year (28). Many saw nationalistic motives behind the move, aimed at strengthening the state’s integration of the largely Russian-speaking north (29).

On language, the same census found that only 25.1% of Russians said they had command of (“vladeet”) Kazakh and 9.3% that they used it in everyday life, against 99.6% of Kazakhs (22). The 2026 constitution makes Kazakh the state language and provides that Russian is officially used “alongside” (“naryadu s”) Kazakh in state bodies and local government (Article 9) (30). Article 7 of the 1995 constitution had said “on an equal basis” (“naravne s”) (31). Bakyt Nurmukhanov, deputy chairman of the Constitutional Court, explained the change of wording as a revision to ensure terminological and semantic uniformity (32).

The ethnic Russian population of the north has repeatedly surfaced in the political language of both countries. In August 2014, at a youth camp at Lake Seliger, Russian President Vladimir Putin said, in effect, that Kazakhs had never had a state and that President Nursultan Nazarbayev had created one, provoking a backlash in Kazakhstan (33). Conversely, in June 2022, at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev called Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine “quasi-states” and indicated that Kazakhstan would not recognise them as independent. Applying the principle of self-determination across the world, he argued, would lead to chaos, and this was the same reason why Kazakhstan does not recognise Taiwan, Kosovo, South Ossetia or Abkhazia (34). The remarks can also be read as a statement that a country with a minority concentrated in particular regions gives priority to the principle of territorial integrity. The presence of ethnic Russians and the status of the Russian language cannot, however, simply be equated with channels of Russian influence. Kazakh behaviour that appears favourable to Russia may stem from Russia’s own efforts or may arise within Kazakhstan itself, and the two need to be distinguished (35).

In the autumn of the same year, people moved in the opposite direction. Between Russia’s announcement of partial mobilisation on 21 September and 4 October, more than 200,000 Russian citizens entered Kazakhstan and about 147,000 left, according to Kazakhstan’s interior minister (36). These are counts of entries and exits, not of settlers, but they showed the scale and speed of movement between the two countries.

Treaties and institutions linking Kazakhstan with Russia

The foundation of bilateral relations with Russia is the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance of 25 May 1992 (4). On 11 November 2013 the Treaty on Good-Neighbourliness and Alliance in the 21st Century was signed in Yekaterinburg. In it the two countries confirm the inviolability of the border defined by the 2005 border treaty (Article 2); undertake not to join blocs or alliances directed against the other and not to assist third states in armed conflict with the other (Article 3); and provide for the coordination of foreign policy (Article 4), coordinated management of migration including the free movement of citizens (Article 8), and protection of the ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious identity of national minorities (Article 9). In the economy the treaty provides for integration cooperation in the trade, investment and scientific fields (Article 11), and in security for deepening ties in defence and military-technical areas (Article 18). It entered into force on 22 December 2014 for a term of five years, extended automatically for further five-year periods (Article 30) (16). Kazakhstan ratified it by a law of 7 November 2014 (No. 246-V) (16). On the border, a state border treaty was signed in Moscow on 18 January 2005, ratified by Kazakhstan by a law of 2 December 2005 (No. 92), and entered into force on 12 January 2006. The treaty provides for a joint demarcation commission, formed on a parity basis, to mark the border on the ground (12).

Among multilateral frameworks, Kazakhstan is a founding member of the Eurasian Economic Union, whose founding treaty was signed in Astana on 29 May 2014 and entered into force on 1 January 2015 (18). This integration was not Russia’s project alone. In a lecture at Moscow State University on 29 March 1994, President Nazarbayev proposed a “Eurasian Union” with supranational bodies responsible for forming a single economic space and ensuring a common defence policy, while all other questions of sovereignty, internal political structure and each member’s foreign policy would remain untouched. As the creation of the EAEU approached in 2013–14, he repeatedly stated that politicising the union was unacceptable and that it was purely economic cooperation (6). In the meantime, the Eurasian Economic Community was established in Astana on 10 October 2000, the Customs Union was launched in 2010, and the treaties forming the Common Economic Space entered into force in January 2012, leading to the EAEU treaty of 2014 (7). Kazakhstan was thus one of the early advocates of economic integration and, at the same time, a party that has sought to keep its scope economic. In 2025 Kazakhstan’s trade within the EAEU amounted to USD 30.89 billion, of which 88.6% was with Russia (2). In security, Kazakhstan is a member of the Russia-led CSTO; during the unrest of January 2022 the organisation’s troops were deployed at the government’s request and withdrawn by the 19th of that month (21).

Long-term ties also exist outside these institutions. The Baikonur Cosmodrome is leased to Russia until 2050 under an agreement of 2004 (37). In June 2025 Russia’s Rosatom was chosen to lead the international consortium that will build Kazakhstan’s first nuclear power plant (38), and a construction contract was reported to have been signed in September 2026 (39).

In macroeconomic terms, too, developments in Russia pass directly to Kazakhstan. In a 2015 report the National Bank stated that, of Russia, China and the EU, which together accounted for about 60% of trade turnover, Russian trends had a particularly strong influence. When the rouble fell sharply at the end of 2014, Russian goods became cheaper in the Kazakh market, which, in the Bank’s analysis, restrained price growth in early 2015 (40).

Since 2022, new constraints have been added to these ties. In April 2022 a senior official of the presidential administration said that Kazakhstan would not be a tool for circumventing US and EU sanctions on Russia and that it wished to avoid becoming subject to secondary sanctions (41). When the United States designated the Moscow Exchange in June 2024, the exchange held 13.1% of the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange (KASE) (42); it ceased to be a shareholder in October of that year (43).

China: from border settlement to the Silk Road Economic Belt

China and Kazakhstan established diplomatic relations on 3 January 1992 (5). The main issue in the 1990s was the border. The two countries signed a border agreement in Almaty on 26 April 1994, which entered into force on 11 September 1995 (8), and concluded supplementary agreements on the remaining sections on 24 September 1997 (44) and in 1998 (45). In parallel, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan signed agreements in 1996 and 1997 on military confidence-building and the reduction of forces in border areas, and the mechanism of regular summits among the five became known as the “Shanghai Five”. Uzbekistan joined in 2000, and the six countries founded the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation on 15 June 2001 (10). On 23 December 2002 the two heads of state signed a Treaty of Good-Neighbourliness, Friendship and Cooperation (11). Relations with China thus began with settling border and security questions within a multilateral framework that included Russia.

Economic ties began before the 2013 vision, in upstream oil and pipelines. Under a bilateral agreement of 1997, CNPC acquired about 60% of the shares of Aktobemunaigas (9), and in August 2005 it was announced that a CNPC subsidiary had agreed to acquire PetroKazakhstan, headquartered in Calgary, Canada, for about USD 4.18 billion (13). In July 2006 the first Kazakh crude reached the Chinese receiving point through the Atasu–Alashankou oil pipeline (14), and in December 2009 the Central Asia–China gas pipeline, which runs from Turkmenistan through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and enters China at Khorgos, was inaugurated; its Kazakh section is about 1,300 km long (15).

On top of these came the speech President Xi Jinping gave at Nazarbayev University in Astana on 7 September 2013. In it he proposed that China and the Central Asian countries build a “Silk Road Economic Belt” step by step, and named five concrete measures: strengthening policy communication, improving road connectivity (opening a transport channel from the Pacific to the Baltic Sea), promoting trade facilitation, enhancing monetary circulation and strengthening people-to-people exchanges. According to China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, President Nazarbayev fully agreed with the vision (17). A month later, in Indonesia, Xi proposed the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road”, and the two proposals together became the Belt and Road Initiative (46).

The timing of the proposal coincided with the building of frameworks with Russia. The treaty on good-neighbourliness and alliance was signed two months after the September 2013 speech, and in May 2014 the EAEU founding treaty was signed in the same city, Astana (16)(18). In a joint statement of 8 May 2015, China and Russia declared that they would work to align the building of the Silk Road Economic Belt with the building of the EAEU, and supported launching a dialogue mechanism between China and the EAEU (19). Kazakhstan, for its part, signed a document on aligning the Belt with its own new economic policy, “Nurly Zhol” (Bright Path), at a summit on 2 September 2016 (20). The regional visions of both large powers were thus each given form in Astana, and coordinating the two became a subject of diplomatic documents in its own right.

Among today’s concrete ties, those in energy and cross-border logistics stand out. The joint venture that operates the Kazakhstan–China oil pipeline is owned 50:50 by the state-owned KazTransOil and CNODC, a CNPC subsidiary (47). In 2025, however, Kazakhstan exported only 1.094 million tonnes of crude oil to China through this pipeline, 1.4% of its total exports of crude oil and gas condensate (48). The same system also carries Russian crude in transit to China (14). In the breakdown KazTransOil published for the first quarter of 2025, transit of Russian oil to China was 2.48 million tonnes, against Kazakh exports to China of 238,000 tonnes. The company moved a total of 2.367 million tonnes of Kazakh crude through the system in that period, but most of it, 2.129 million tonnes, was supply to the domestic market. The “2.4 million tonnes” to China in the headline of the report refers to the whole system including this domestic supply, not to exports to China (47). Upstream, CNPC holds an 8.33% interest in the North Caspian production sharing agreement, which includes the Kashagan field (49). In overland logistics, the dry port at Khorgos on the Chinese border handled more than 372,000 TEU of containers in 2025 (50), and the Altynkol–Khorgos rail crossing carried more than 16.1 million tonnes of freight in the same year (51). In finance, the Shanghai Stock Exchange took a 25.1% stake in the Astana International Exchange (AIX), which opened in 2018 (52). A mutual visa-exemption agreement entered into force in November 2023 (5).

Economic relations with China have also been accompanied by friction in society. In late April and early May 2016, protests took place across the country against amendments to the land code that would have extended the period for which foreigners could lease agricultural land from 10 to 25 years, and on 5 May President Nazarbayev announced a moratorium on the reforms (53). In China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Kazakhs and other predominantly Muslim groups live alongside Uyghurs. In its assessment of August 2022, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) concluded that serious human rights violations had been committed there against Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities, including ethnic Kazakhs. The assessment drew on interviews with 40 people, 16 of them ethnic Kazakhs; it was shared in advance with the Chinese government, whose response is annexed to it (54). The assessment concerns the situation within China; how it was received in Kazakhstan is not covered in this article.

Trade: the weight of the two neighbours in two sets of statistics

According to the Bureau of National Statistics, in 2025 Russia (29.7%) and China (29.2%) were almost level as sources of imports, while among export destinations Italy (19.8%) was followed by China (19.2%), Russia (10.3%) and the Netherlands (7.6%) (2). Because the Bureau publishes only the shares by country, multiplying them by total exports and imports gives the approximate values shown in Table 3.

Table 3. Trade in goods with Russia and China (2025)

Item	Russia	China
Share of Kazakhstan’s exports	10.3%	19.2%
Share of Kazakhstan’s imports	29.7%	29.2%
Exports (approx.)	about USD 8.1 bn	about USD 15.2 bn
Imports (approx.)	about USD 19.3 bn	about USD 18.9 bn
Total trade (approx.)	about USD 27.4 bn	about USD 34.1 bn
Total trade according to the partner’s statistics	Not published	USD 48.7 bn (Chinese exports USD 29.7 bn, imports USD 19.0 bn)

Sources: Kazakh shares from the Bureau of National Statistics (2). Values are the author’s calculations from exports of USD 79.041 billion and imports of USD 64.847 billion (preliminary) and are approximate, because the shares are published to one decimal place. The total for Russia is broadly consistent with 88.6% of EAEU trade of USD 30.893 billion. Chinese figures are China’s statistics as cited by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (5).

In this 2025 snapshot, China is Kazakhstan’s largest trading partner in terms of total trade, ahead of Russia, while Russia is the largest source of imports. This article does not examine how the shares have changed over time. Exports to Russia are probably small because much of the main export, crude oil, crosses Russia on its way to Europe and elsewhere and is not counted as exports to Russia itself. This is the author’s inference, but it is consistent with Italy being the top export destination and the Netherlands the fourth (2).

The discrepancy with China’s statistics requires attention. Against Chinese exports to Kazakhstan of USD 29.7 billion in China’s statistics, Kazakhstan’s statistics record imports from China of about USD 18.9 billion; the former is about 1.6 times the latter (5)(2). The UN Statistics Division names three main reasons why bilateral trade statistics fail to match: different criteria of partner attribution in import and export statistics, the valuation of imports on a CIF basis (including freight and insurance) and of exports on an FOB basis, and differences between the general and special trade systems. It also lists goods passing through third countries, incomplete identification of re-exports and differences in the timing of recording, among others (55). The CIF–FOB difference, however, works to make the importer’s figure larger, so it cannot explain a gap in this direction. For Central Asia, a World Bank study comparing partner countries’ export statistics showed that much of the consumer goods entering from China and traded through bazaars had not been recorded in the import statistics of Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz Republic, because of trade regimes friendly to shuttle trading and, in some cases, tolerance of smuggling (56). That study, however, covers the late 2000s (2005–10), and how much of today’s gap is due to such factors cannot be established from published aggregates. This article confines itself to noting the gap and presenting both figures. On the Russian side, the Federal Customs Service stopped publishing trade statistics by partner country after February 2022 (57), so there is no way to cross-check against the partner’s data.

Crude oil export routes: dependence on the CPC

Kazakhstan’s crude exports rely on the pipeline of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC). The CPC was established when Kazakhstan and Oman signed an agreement on 17 July 1992; Russia joined a month later. In 1996, eight private shareholders representing major oil companies joined the project; construction began on 12 May 1999, and on 13 October 2001 the first tanker was loaded at the marine terminal near Novorossiysk (58). The pipeline runs 1,511 km from Tengiz in western Kazakhstan to the Black Sea coast, and its capacity reached 67 million tonnes a year with the expansion completed in 2018 (59). Under a subsequent debottlenecking programme, transport of up to 72.5 million tonnes a year in Kazakhstan and up to 82 million tonnes a year in Russia has become technically possible (60). On 1 September 2025, cumulative shipments since the start of operations reached one billion tonnes (58).

The shareholders are the Russian Federation (with Transneft as trustee), 24%; Kazakhstan’s national oil company KazMunayGas, 19%; a Chevron subsidiary, 15%; LUKOIL International, 12.5%; Mobil Caspian Pipeline Company and Rosneft-Shell Caspian Ventures, 7.5% each; IC CPC Company, 7%; BG Overseas Holding and Eni International, 2% each; and Kazakhstan Pipeline Ventures and Oryx Caspian Pipeline, 1.75% each (61). Adding up only the holdings of the states and their trustees (the author’s calculation), the Russian side holds 31% (the Russian Federation’s 24% plus IC CPC Company’s 7%) and the Kazakh side 20.75% (KazMunayGas’s 19% plus Kazakhstan Pipeline Ventures’ 1.75%) (62). Separately, a subsidiary of the Russian company LUKOIL holds 12.5%, and Rosneft-Shell Caspian Ventures, in which Rosneft has a stake, holds 7.5% (61). Although the pipeline carries Kazakh crude, its route and marine terminal lie on Russian territory.

Table 4 shows the export routes for crude oil and gas condensate in 2025.

Table 4. Kazakhstan’s export routes for crude oil and gas condensate (2025)

Route	Exports	Share of total exports
CPC (via Russian territory to Novorossiysk)	64.8 million tonnes	82.2%
Atyrau–Samara (into the Russian pipeline network)	9.3 million tonnes	11.8%
Port of Aktau (shipping across the Caspian)	3.47 million tonnes	4.4%
Pipeline to China (Atasu–Alashankou)	1.094 million tonnes	1.4%
Rail	0.99 million tonnes	1.3%
Total	78.8 million tonnes

Source: press report citing Ministry of Energy data (48). Shares are the author’s calculations against total exports. The route figures add up to 79.65 million tonnes, more than the total of 78.8 million tonnes, and the shares sum to about 101%; they are shown as in the source. The CPC figure is 1 million tonnes larger than the 63.8 million tonnes of Kazakh oil via the CPC announced separately by the government (63).

Together, the CPC and Atyrau–Samara account for just over 90% of exports crossing Russian territory: 74.1 million tonnes, or 94%, on the figures in Table 4, and 93% if the government’s 63.8 million tonnes is used for the CPC (the author’s calculations). Of the 9.3 million tonnes via Atyrau–Samara, 2.146 million tonnes were sent to Germany through Russia’s Druzhba pipeline, an increase of 44% on the previous year (48). In April 2026, however, the energy minister said that there had been no official notice from the Russian side, that according to unofficial information the oil could not be sent for technical reasons, and that transit to Germany for May was zero (64), an example of the risk of concentrating routes on one country’s territory. The main route that avoids Russia runs from the port of Aktau across the Caspian to the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline in Azerbaijan. Volumes on this route were 1.057 million tonnes in 2023 and 1.4 million tonnes in 2024 (65), and according to press reports fell by 11% in 2025 (48). The government has also announced that the CPC shipped 70.5 million tonnes in total in 2025, of which 63.8 million tonnes were Kazakh oil (63). CPC volumes include crude from Russian producers.

From 2022 onwards, this concentration of routes began to show itself as a concrete risk of supply interruption. On 5 July 2022, a district court in Novorossiysk partly upheld a claim by the Federal Service for Supervision of Transport (Rostransnadzor) and, citing documentary violations relating to the oil-spill response plan, ordered the CPC’s Russian entity to suspend operations for 30 days (66). Later that month the Krasnodar Regional Court replaced the suspension with a fine of 200,000 roubles (67). In the meantime, on 7 July, President Tokayev described the trans-Caspian route as “the priority” and instructed KazMunayGas to find the best way to implement it, including by bringing in the investors in the Tengiz project (68).

From 2025, the effects of the war between Russia and Ukraine reached the facilities themselves. On 17 February 2025 the Kropotkinskaya pumping station in southern Russia was damaged by a drone attack; after a restart in a technical pumping mode, it returned to normal operation on 23 May. On 29 November of that year a single point mooring at the marine terminal (SPM-2) was seriously damaged by a naval drone (69). Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement the next day protesting what it called the third act of aggression against an exclusively civilian facility, and said it regarded the incident as damaging to bilateral relations with Ukraine (70). Between January and September 2026, tankers heading for the terminal or loading there were repeatedly attacked or struck (in January, on 14 March and in July), and on 14 August loading stopped at Russia’s Sheskharis terminal in Novorossiysk, which also handles Kazakh crude (69). On 8 September a drone incident near the CPC terminal again briefly halted loading at SPM-2 and SPM-3 (62). The energy minister said that the incidents in January and July had cost 3.5 million tonnes of production and that the 2026 production plan would be cut from 98 million to 96 million tonnes (62).

Why the Middle Corridor grew

In overland transport between China and Europe, the “Northern Corridor” through Russia and Belarus long played the leading role. According to a 2023 World Bank report, the Northern Corridor handled more than 86% of China–Europe overland traffic in 2019–2021, while the capacity of the trans-Caspian Middle Corridor covered less than 1% of the total (71). The Middle Corridor runs from Kazakhstan by ship across the Caspian and then through Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Black Sea or Türkiye; the Kazakh government calls it the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route.

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the picture changed. The report explains that many European shippers and transport operators chose not to send or receive goods across Russian territory, both to protest Russia’s actions and to avoid the difficulty of insuring freight passing through Russia, so that from March 2022 the option of shipping via the Caspian became comparatively attractive. Container traffic on the Middle Corridor rose by 33% in 2022 compared with 2021, although trade along the corridor grew by only 10% in volume (tonnes) over the same period (71). According to the Kazakh government, volumes on the route grew from 0.8 million tonnes in 2020 to 4.5 million tonnes in 2024 (72), and transit containers on the trans-Caspian route increased 3.8-fold between 2022 and 2025 (73). The World Bank’s explanation here concerns growth in 2022; other factors may also have contributed from 2024 onwards. This article does not separate the contributions of the different factors.

Operations, however, did not keep up with the surge in demand. According to the same World Bank report, the corridor’s technical operational capacity was not reached, but border crossings, transshipment and coordination problems caused very long delays. In 2022, moving cargo from Dostyk or Khorgos in Kazakhstan to Constanța in Romania via the Middle Corridor took more than 50 days, about twice as long as by the Northern Corridor. Because of operational inefficiencies and high costs, by March 2023 a significant share of the additional traffic had returned to sea routes and elsewhere, and container traffic in the first eight months of 2023 was 37% below the same period of 2022 (71). In November 2022, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Türkiye signed a “Roadmap” listing priority investments and measures (71). The report estimates that if infrastructure projects are implemented, cargo crossing the Caspian could exceed 11 million tonnes in 2030, about three times the 2021 level, but that even then only about 1% of China–EU trade would transit the Caspian (71). The Kazakh government puts the route’s current capacity at about 6 million tonnes and 182,000 containers a year, and plans to raise it to 10 million tonnes by 2030 (72).

The Middle Corridor did not grow, therefore, because the new route became cheaper or faster than the existing one. It grew because the political and insurance costs of crossing Russian territory rose, changing the relative position of the routes. For 2025, the volumes by weight (tonnes) given in press reports and in government-related announcements are inconsistent, and this article does not use them; the 3.8-fold figure above refers to the number of containers.

The author’s view

In a study of great-power relations over Central Asia, Alexander Cooley discussed the contest among the United States, Russia and China, describing Russia as seeking political influence in the region and China access to natural resources and stability in Xinjiang, while Central Asian regimes used the competition between the powers for their own survival and gain (“local rules”) (74). The book predates the Belt and Road and 2022. For Russia and China, this article tests that picture at a single point: the export routes for crude oil.

The author’s view is that, at least until around 2030, the dependence of Kazakhstan’s crude export routes on Russian territory is unlikely to change greatly. This is a view about the structure of transport, not an outlook for any company or for assets traded in any market, and its scope is limited to crude export routes. For gas, the Central Asia–China gas pipeline that opened in 2009 runs through Kazakhstan (15), and China is already a party to the transport route.

The main reason for this view on crude is the difference in scale. Of the crude oil and gas condensate exported in 2025, just over 90% (93–94%) crossed Russian territory. The actual volumes on routes avoiding Russia were 3.47 million tonnes shipped from the port of Aktau and 1.094 million tonnes through the pipeline to China (48), with about 1.4 million tonnes via the BTC in 2024 (65). Crude entering the BTC crosses the Caspian mainly from the port of Aktau and similar points, so it partly overlaps with the Aktau figure; and since the Aktau figure is for 2025 and the BTC figure for 2024, the two cannot be added together. The CPC alone carried 64.8 million tonnes (48), an order of magnitude more. Moreover, the CPC’s facilities and shareholder structure rest on long-term investments and contracts dating back to the 1990s (58)(61).

The conditions under which this view would prove wrong can also be stated in figures. If, by around 2030, the combined volume of the routes in Table 4 that avoid Russia (the port of Aktau, the pipeline to China and the part of rail that does not cross Russia) exceeds 10 million tonnes a year (just over a tenth of total exports; in 2025 it was at most about 5.55 million tonnes even counting all rail), or a long-term stoppage of the CPC reshapes the allocation of exports, the structure should be regarded as having changed. This 10 million tonnes is a yardstick for crude oil and is distinct from the capacity target of 10 million tonnes in 2030 for all cargo on the Middle Corridor mentioned in the previous section. There are factors pushing in that direction. Since 2022 the government has explicitly made diversifying routes a policy priority (68), and the attacks on facilities since 2025 have turned the risk of route concentration into actual lost production (62). The halt of Druzhba transit to Germany announced in April 2026 is an experience pointing the same way (64). For crude, the keys are the capacity of Caspian tankers and of the BTC, and the decisions of the investors in Tengiz and Kashagan. Even if China’s weight in overall trade is already large, for crude export routes the figures above provide the yardstick for measuring change.

Reading the statistics and sources

Table 5 summarises where the main sources used in this article can be found.

Table 5. Main sources

Subject	Source	Caveats
Ethnic composition and language	Census of the Bureau of National Statistics (stat.gov.kz)	Regional figures use 2021 boundaries, before the 2022 division of regions
Trading partners	Trade statistics of the Bureau of National Statistics	Only shares are published by country; preliminary figures are revised
Trade on the Chinese side	Chinese statistics (cited, for example, in the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs country profile)	Differs widely from Kazakh figures
Trade on the Russian side	Federal Customs Service	Publication by country has stopped since 2022
Crude export routes	Announcements by the Ministry of Energy, the CPC and KazTransOil, and press reports of them	CPC volumes include Russian oil; route figures vary with definitions
Middle Corridor	Kazakh government announcements; World Bank report	Weight (tonnes), numbers of containers and TEU are all used, and figures conflict in some years
Treaties and agreements	Ratification laws (adilet.zan.kz, zakon.uchet.kz and others); treaty collection of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs	The 1992 treaty is cited from a press report

At least three points need to be kept in mind when reading these figures. First, the weight of a trading partner changes considerably depending on whose statistics are used: total trade with China is about USD 34.1 billion in Kazakhstan’s statistics and USD 48.7 billion in China’s. Second, the share of crude exported “via Russia” is about 80% if only the CPC is counted, and more than 90% if Atyrau–Samara is added; it is necessary to check which routes a figure includes. Third, the 2021 census is the latest source for regional figures on the ethnic Russian population of the north, and population movements since then are not reflected. This article relies on materials published in Russian, English and Chinese and on press reports of them; it does not cover materials published only in Kazakh. In this series, figures are given with their access dates and will be updated as they are revised.