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COMMENT: Is Kazakhstan quietly ditching Russia?

With Putin’s war and economy going badly, the suggestion is that China will soon be seen as the clear number one strategic partner to the Kazakhs.

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Zelenskyy names young general Drapatyi as Ukraine’s new military chief

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has named Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi as Commander-in-Chief of the country’s armed forces, replacing Oleksandr Syrskyi in the most significant change at the top of Ukraine’s military since 2024.

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Uzbekistan balances secular rule with Islamic revival

Tashkent is seeking to place its Islamic intellectual heritage at the centre of its national identity and foreign diplomacy, while preserving a firmly secular political system.

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Climate change, not dams, driving Caspian Sea shrinkage, researcher says

The Caspian Sea's decline owes more to climate change than to dams or river abstraction, a water policy researcher says, with the Volga's navigation-focused dams limiting draw-off and Tehran's groundwater and wastewater plans making little progress.

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Gas tanker bound for Ukraine hit in Black Sea within Romania’s Exclusive Economic Zone

A Liberian-flagged LPG tanker caught fire after an explosion during the night of July 20-21, after being struck by three drones while sailing approximately 20 nautical miles southeast of Sfântu Gheorghe.

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Turkish opposition leader to take fight to Erdogan at head of new party

Century-old CHP has been decapitated by judicial rulings that critics say amount to a “political coup”.

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Zelenskyy names young general Drapatyi as Ukraine’s new military chief

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PANNIER: Central Asia on cusp of ending quest for independence in electricity provision

Big hydro projects should get the region over the line.

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Moody's upgrades Argentina, aligning top three rating agencies for first time in decade

América Móvil buys Peru's WOW to expand fixed-broadband footprint

Latin America's rightward shift bolsters investor confidence, BMI says

Moody's upgrades Argentina, aligning top three rating agencies for first time in decade

Moody's joins Fitch and S&P in upgrading Argentina's credit rating, bonds and bank stocks rally, and the peso holds steady — as Georgieva's IMF prepares a landmark visit to Buenos Aires.

América Móvil buys Peru's WOW to expand fixed-broadband footprint

América Móvil is strengthening its fibre strategy in Latin America with the acquisition of Peru's WOW Tel, highlighting accelerating consolidation in the region's broadband market as operators race to expand high-speed infrastructure.

Latin America's rightward shift bolsters investor confidence, BMI says

Latin America's ongoing shift to the right across a wave of presidential elections is reinforcing a constructive outlook for the region's economies, according to BMI, Fitch Solutions' research unit.

Latest Updates

News

The European Union and Oman have signed an agreement to establish an EU diplomatic mission in Muscat, marking a significant step in strengthening political, economic and strategic ties between the two sides.

Officials from Iran's Tehran Chamber and China's Khorgos International Chamber of Commerce have discussed a joint transport corridor to expand bilateral trade, with proposals to be drawn up into a memorandum of understanding.

The US is set to sign a 30-year civil nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia that could open the door to uranium enrichment in the kingdom, drawing opposition from US lawmakers and Israel over fears it could enable a path to nuclear weapons.

DP World has secured a €25mn EBRD loan towards a €100mn programme to electrify its Constanta South Container Terminal in Romania, cutting CO2 emissions by more than 6,000 tonnes

French fashion chain Kiabi will enter Argentina next month with a $20mn plan to open up to 20 stores over five years, joining a wave of international brands returning to the market under President Javier Milei's trade opening.

Tech

Venezuelan financial technology company Cashea has raised $100mn from a group of international investors led by FinSight Ventures and Spice Expeditions.

Following the exodus of Western retailers from Russia as the Kremlin ignited a full-scale war in Ukraine, Turkish apparel chains stepped in aggressively to grab market share.

OpenAI is setting up a business development operation in Israel, hiring a senior AWS executive to court local startups, as it races Anthropic and Google for enterprise AI spending.

A cyberattack has taken Romania's ANCPI land registry offline since July 14, freezing property transactions nationwide just as a reduced VAT rate nears expiry, with the attacker claiming to have wiped the database.

The price demanded of the consumer in Turkey for an Apple iPhone 17 Pro is higher than anywhere else in the world, according to Deutsche Bank Research Institute’s Mapping the World’s Prices 2026 report.

Opinion

OSW analysts say PM Péter Magyar's sweeping constitutional changes aimed at restoring the rule of law relied "on tools similar to those for which Fidesz was criticised for years".

Ukrainian strikes on Russian energy infrastructure are reshaping fuel markets without significantly reducing Moscow's oil export revenues, analyst argues.

From prison cell, launches blistering attack on collapse of judiciary that will silence political dissent ahead of all elections.

The rising costs of the Ukraine war have forced the Russian government to increase spending, causing the federal budget deficit to expand further. High spending growth is making it hard for the CBR to cut rates and revive the economy.

Iran’s central bank is squeezing liquidity to defend the rial, meeting under a fifth of banks’ funding demand as inflation hits 57.7% and money supply growth tops 53% after the war with the US and Israel.

Data

Poland's deficit of around 7% of GDP is unlikely to trigger a debt crisis but will weaken investment and raise bond-market risk, Capital Economics says, with debt set to breach the statutory prudential threshold by 2027.

Moldova's industrial production increased by 7.3% y/y in January-May, driven by a 6.2% expansion in the core manufacturing sector and a 14.7% rise in utilities output, new data says.

Polish retail sales grew 6.2% year-on-year (y/y) in constant prices in June, accelerating from a 3% y/y rise in May. The data surprised analysts, defying expectations of a slowdown due to weakened growth of real wages.

Russia’s international reserves edged up to $722.4bn in the week ending 10 July, according to the Central Bank of Russia, extending a recovery after a sharp fall in late June.

Russia's central bank has warned that the recent surge in inflation is spreading beyond a temporary fuel price shock, while economists have sharply raised their forecasts for inflation and interest rates, complicating Kremlin hopes for rate cuts,

Features

Wars are reshaping countries’ thinking on how to get goods in and out.

An Ankara conference has urged a Turkey, Russia, China and Iran alliance to deter the US. The treaty may never be signed, but the trade flows, pipelines and payment systems suggest the bloc already exists in all but name.

Central European economies are emerging as unexpected beneficiaries of the global artificial intelligence boom, with Poland and Hungary seeing growth in exports linked to AI infrastructure.

Russia’s deepening fuel crisis is spreading beyond filling-station queues into freight, agriculture, retail and public services, threatening to deliver a fresh inflationary shock as the country enters its peak harvest season.

A US sanctions bill originally promoted by the late Senator Lindsey Graham and Democrat Richard Blumenthal has moved close to passage after being stalled in Congress for more than a year.

Blogs

The tit-for-tat missile war escalated at the weekend after Ukraine hit the largest distribution centre belonging to Wildberries, the “Amazon of Russia.” The Kremlin hit back the next day with a massive drone and missile barrage.

What is in store for Ukraine? There are two starkly different possibilities. It can become Finland — a country that lost a war, lost a tenth of its territory, swallowed neutrality, and then got rich. Or it can become Afghanistan.

Ukraine just got a new Prime Minister, Serhii Koretskyi, an oil and gas man that cut his teeth as an oil trader in the private sector before going to run Ukraine’s two biggest energy companies: Ukrnafta and Naftogaz.

Tehran's cafés and traffic jams are back weeks into renewed war, but residents interviewed say inflation and the cost of rebuilding now dominate conversation, with little appetite for another round of fighting.

The European Union's renewed drive to expand eastwards could face its biggest political obstacle yet if French far-right leader Marine Le Pen wins the 2027 presidential election.

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Energy Dome, a Milan-based energy-storage developer, plans to build a battery in County Offaly that uses carbon dioxide rather than lithium to store power.

A Colombian company has developed one of the world's few commercially viable natural blue food colourings, extracted from the jagua fruit found in the country's tropical forests.

Hungary’s government has launched a major wind power expansion programme aimed at increasing installed wind capacity more than tenfold by 2030.

Poland has assembled a 10-country coalition to press Brussels to slow the tightening of the bloc’s emissions trading system and reconsider a carbon market for buildings and road transport.

Cambodia approved more than $1bn worth of renewable energy projects in the first half of 2026, strengthening its clean energy capacity and supporting broader investment growth.

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Nato General Secretary Mark Rutte warned that the West needs to prepare of the possibility that Chinese President Xi Jinping will ....

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