Transcription
Hello, I'm Yashinski. Welcome aboard the Eastern Express. And as always, I hope you enjoy the journey.
A couple square kilometers does not sound like a lot, especially in the greater geopolitical scheme of things. But in Central Asia, a plot of land that small can decide whether a village belongs to one state or another, whether a road can be built, and whether an old Soviet border keeps producing new fights. And trust me, these fights had been going on for quite some time, for decades, actually, because Moscow's map makers of the past left behind borders that looked neat in an office, but ended up being poisonous on the ground. Villages cut off from their ethnic kin, roads blocked by customs posts, exclaves surrounded by another country's territory.
Now, Central Asian governments are doing something unusually practical with that inheritance. They are swapping land. For decades, the Fergana Valley was one of Central Asia's most dangerous fault lines. Soviet era borders drawn with little regard for future statehood left behind a maze of enclaves, disputed territory, and isolated communities. Every disagreement over a road, a water canal or a checkpoint carried the potential to escalate into a diplomatic crisis or worse. That is precisely why the recent transfer of the Chungara and Tashtobbo enclaves from Usbekistan to Kyrgyzstan matters. On paper, it is a modest land swap involving two territories. Politically, however, it reflects a much deeper transformation in how Central Asia's borders are managed.
Since coming to power in 2016, Usbekistani President Shafkat Miroy has abandoned the confrontational approach that long defined Tajkin's relations with its neighbors. Instead of treating borders primarily as security barriers, Usbekistan has increasingly approached them as political problems that can be resolved through negotiation, compromise, and mutually beneficial exchanges. The landmark border agreement signed with Kyrgystan in 2022 laid the foundation for that shift. Chungara and Tashto go one step further. Rather than relocating residents, the agreement integrates predominantly ethnic Kergiz communities directly into Kyrgyzstan while compensating Usbekiststan with territory elsewhere. The accompanying infrastructure deal, which dramatically shortens travel times in southwestern Kyrgyzstan, highlights that connectivity has become as important as sovereignty.
Not every enclave can be resolved this way. Larger territories present far more complicated demographic and strategic challenges. Yet, that is not the main story. The real significance lies in the change of mindset. A region once synonymous with barbed wire, closed crossings, and recurring border crises is increasingly solving inherited Soviet disputes through diplomacy rather than confrontation. The borders themselves have changed only marginally. What has changed fundamentally is the political logic governing them.
>> And now we're zoning in on the east flinging portion of our show. Central Asia's complicated borders are largely the legacy of decisions made during the Soviet era. When the Soviet Union created the five Central Asian republics in the 1920s and 1930s, they were designed as internal administrative units rather than future independent states. Moscow did not expect these borders to become international frontiers. As always, here is a closer look.
The greatest complexity emerged in the Forgana Valley, one of the region's most densely populated and ethnically mixed areas. Communities of Usuzbcks, Aeris, and Tajiks had lived side by side for centuries, making it impossible to draw clean ethnic boundaries. Soviet planners therefore created borders that often cut through villages, farmland, and transport routes while leaving enclaves. Small pieces of one republic completely surrounded by another. For decades, these arrangements caused relatively few problems because people and goods could move within the Soviet Union. After its collapse in 1991, however, those administrative boundaries suddenly became international borders. What had once been a routine journey to a neighboring village could now involve customs checks, visas, or military checkpoints. The result was decades of disputes over territory, water resources, roads, and access to isolated communities. Border closures, competing territorial claims, and occasional armed clashes became particularly common between Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Usbekiststan.
And now, as always, it's time to take a look at the issue in greater detail. In Central Asia, the latest border news is easy to miss because the numbers are small. A few villages here, several settlements there, a road project somewhere else. And yet, these small territorial swaps, they matter more than the size suggests. Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Isbekiststan and Tajjikhstan are dealing with one of the Soviet Union's most durable leftovers, borders that often failed to match the people living along them. Soviet officials drew and redrew boundaries of its republics with little patience for ethnicity, geography, water access, or a simple question of whether people could get from one part of their daily life to another without crossing a border checkpoint. That did not matter as much when all of it was inside the Soviet Union. A bad internal border was still a bad border, but it was managed by one imperial center. After 1991, those lines hardened into international frontiers. Suddenly, the route to a pasture, school, cemetery, or market could run through another country. Border guards replaced local arrangements. Customs posts appeared where families had once moved back and forth. The worst cases were exclaves, small pieces of one country completely surrounded by another. At the end of Soviet rule, Central Asia had more than 30 of them. Most were tiny. Many were obscure. But in the Fergana Valley and along the Kirus Tajik border, disputes over roads, lands, and water have repeatedly turned violent. When maps are messy and states are weak, a checkpoint can become a battlefield very, very quickly.
For years, the obvious solution was also the politically dangerous one. Exchange territory. Give one side land that makes sense for its population. Give the other side land that makes sense for roads, transport, or administration. Though simple on paper, in politics, it is radioactive. New states do not like giving up territory. Populations often see any concessions as humiliation. International actors often prefer frozen borders because changing them can open doors nobody wants opened. Moscow too long treated unresolved borders as useful leverage. A region full of arguments is easier to pressure than a region that settles its own business. Now that is starting to change. These swaps are negotiated. They involve practical compensation. They are aimed at reducing friction, not manufacturing imperial mythology. That matters because the former Soviet space is full of borders that Moscow once treated as flexible when convenient and sacred when useful. The region is showing that Soviet era problems can be solved without the Kremlin acting as landlord, judge, and fire inspector all at once. That may be the real story here. Central Asian states approving that Moscow's mess does not always require Moscow's permission to fix.
And now here to shed more light on the issue is Bruce Paneer, board member at the Caspian Policy Center. Hello and welcome to Eastern Express.
>> Thank you. Pleasure to be here. So when one looks at the map of Central Asia, especially at Kyrgyzstan, Tajjakistan and Isbekiststan, it's hard to escape the impression that these countries in one particular place looks as if they were arms wrestling, right? I mean the borders are positioned in such a way that it's impossible to imagine that are all basically going on without some sort of conflicts and disputes. But apparently things are getting better, right?
>> Yeah, they are. I mean, you're right to point out that this is happening in the Peragan Valley where Kyrgystan, Tajigistan, and Usbekistan all share sections of that biggest agricultural area in all of Central Asia. Um, and then of course this is a legacy of the Soviet Union where they drew very illogical, I'll say illogical borders from the place. And so there's you have islands of one country inside another but it's totally cut off by road from the country proper whether that's Kyistanistan or Tajikhstan. Um but it has been an issue for the last 35 years but you're right that recently we've actually seen I I'm trying to figure out a great good word to describe it like a boom of land swap deals that are trying to correct this situation after all this time.
And we're going to talk about this in greater detail in a second. But one quick question. You said illogical borders. Now uh for us westerners um talking about illogical borders, it often brings to mind colonialism, right? And borders which are drawn in a straight line with a total disregard of local communities. But these borders are like the opposite of that. They are really intricate. So what went wrong? uh was someone really, you know, basically overdoing it, trying to create a sort of compromise between communities that was never likely to work. How did they end up uh with these small enclaves?
>> Well, the the the anthropological work that was done was kind of cursory in a lot of ways. So the Soviets, meaning ethnic Russians and Slavs from from the European part of the Soviet Union, just kind of came in and talked to some people and decided, okay, this is where we're going to make the border of your country. You know, I've been I've traveled over through the Fergon Valley a lot. There's times where you're on the main road and the fence for the neighboring country is right there and then all of a sudden the fence goes off like two kilometers in one direction and zigzags around and then comes back to the road. Why did they do that? It it defies, like I said, any kind of logic. When you talk to the people on the ground, of course, what they say is this that patch of land on the other side of the fence used to belong to us, but the Soviets redrew the border and they gave it to whoever, the Usuzbcks, the Kiris, the Tajik. Now, on top of that, you have all these enclaves all over the place. Um, Baruk is a huge Tajic community in southern Kyistan. soul. There's a huge Usuzbek community in in also in southern Kirystan but a little further north. Um, you know tens of thousands of people living in these places and they're absolutely surrounded by Kyistan. Kystan has its own enclaves. There was one in Tajikistan. There was one in Usbekiststan that they've actually swapped now too. Um, so it was a nightmare to try and travel around and I'll give you just one example real quick. When you were if you were going from Ash in southern Kyrgystan to Batken, which is far southwestern Kyistan, you had to pass through Sulk. Now, in the Soviet days, this is no problem. It's a long enclave. Uh but you could just drive through on the road. But after militants showed up in Central Asia in the late 1990s, Usuzbekistan closed it off and you had to take detours uh which were poorly marked on dirt roads and it added, you know, hundreds of kilometers and several extra hours to every single trip that you had to do. Security finally built the road, but this is just one example of something that happened all over the Paragon Valley.
>> So now this is not just an inconvenience. This breaks up communities but also makes local um uh businesses uh struggling to function if they want any sort of crossber trade. Uh so you actually have this sort of uh issue related to how the economy is going to operate in this area. So from what we're seeing recently the governments in all those countries are looking at this and saying okay so we cannot continue along this path. We need to make it work. And there have been small exchanges of individual enclaves. Can you tell us more about how it happened?
>> Uh well there was some of these deals have been happening I should say for a while. I mean a couple years ago and Kyistan reached a deal that gave us one of the reservoirs that it wanted. Um but that that was they so they finished demarcating their border finally after all these years. And uh that was an example of a kind of a recent land exchange deal that they had. So that that was already going. Now in the case of the the ones that happened in the last month. Um there was I had just I had alluded to the fact that there was this road through a an Usuzbck enclave that that you had to detour around and it added several hours to the trip. Um the Usuzbcks, the land that the Usuzbcks just gave to the Kyergis um cuts down the travel time between south and north by about 150 kilometers, you know. So it's there were very small patches of ground, but it previously you again you had to take this detour around these areas if you were traveling through Kyrgyzstan. It was extremely inconvenient. uh the Kieran Kirig government doesn't have enough money to build paved roads that detour for detours. So um there's there's a new spirit of cooperation and I I think you rightly pointed out that a lot of this is based on economics. they are cooperating much better in term uh economically and in terms of trade not just regional trade but also international trade and I think it's it's occurred to all the governments certainly in the Faragana Valley that they have to have reliable and quick routes that go through these countries um for their own again for their own trade with the neighboring country but also because they're shipping goods between China and Europe and to have to go through around these detours that add 150 kilometers or for clearly is not in the best interest of trade.
>> So how is it going to inform cooperation going forward? Because small exchanges of territories relatively easy. We actually had cases of voluntary resettlement. People said we no longer want to live here. It's too difficult. We want to live um in our country proper, not in an enclave. And so they got land in exchange um and that was it. But there are larger enclaves there like you know you've mentioned um tens of thousands of people living there. So they are definitely not going to move. Something else would have to be done. Do you think that what matters more is not the mechanism of exchange but the spirit of cooperation uh that could perhaps uh allow this process to move forward in different ways with regard to bigger enclaves and other border complications.
>> I would agree with that. I think the spirit of cooperation is an important thing here. Uh you know in the past when they didn't get along very well and I should qualify that by saying you know up till about 2016 you had the first president of Ubakistan Islam Karim up he was the one that really didn't cooperate very much with neighbors which which led to numerous problems but certainly in terms of the enclaves you know again if you had a if you had a Kiris enclave inside us territory you couldn't cross the Kyugis border to get there. uh if you were part of the Usuzbek enclaves inside Kyrgystan, there would have been times where you couldn't cross from Usbakistan into Kyrgystan to get there. So it was a huge mess but um since Chevy has become president of Usbekistan, this has changed and I and I think everyone sees that there's a lot of advantages to going forward with this. Uh you're you're quite right to point out that the the big enclaves Baruk Shulk Shahim Mardan the last two belong to Usbekiststan they're not going anywhere. they are always going to belong to those countries. They're not giving them up. One because of the population, but two because they're also rich in agriculture in those areas and and the those countries want those enclaves kept as part of their country. What it does ensure though this new cooperation is that you won't have the road closed to get there which has been an issue in the past. So if you want to go from Usbekiststan to the SK enclave or you want to go from Dajikstan to the Varoo enclave, you don't have to worry at least as much about getting into Kyistan and finding out that they're not going to let you go any further and you can't get to the enclave. So that is already a huge plus and again it reduces travel time sometimes, you know, by hours.
Do you think that this corporation is also being incentivized by uh let's just say in a very general sense uh geopolitical situation uh in particular a certain neighbor who has been misbehaving let's just say
>> uh yeah I mean a lot of it has to do with that um you know the northern route through Russia is has uh is complicated and they've been you know everyone's heard about the middle corridor now I think uh it wasn't so much of trade artery prior to February 2022, but they've poured all the countries have poured a lot of money into that and China has and so so is uh the European Union. So, it's really really developed and that's one of the things about this new cooperation too that's helping fuel it. Um there is a railway being built right now, China, Kyistan, Usbekiststan. So now it becomes much more in the interest of the useback government. If Kyistan can move their own goods around internally much quicker and more efficiently. Uh and it's that kind of thinking that that wasn't there before. Tajikhstan's building a road through the south. Uh China is building it because it's going to link them directly from the Chinese border all the way to Kyu's capital. There was a road there. It was really in very miserable shape. Uh but these kind of projects are supported by all the neighbors. Even the ones that don't aren't bordering or not in that area, Kazakhstan, Turkmanistan, further a field, but they're supporting this because they see that this ultimately will lead to the faster shipment of their own goods east or west or the transit of goods through their territory for which they get money too. So, uh, you know, there's a lot of good reasons now for them to cooperate on this and and and get this thing done and and of course it's to the detriment of Russia. There's no doubt about it. And I don't know if that I wouldn't go so far as to say that was by design, but that's simply the way it worked out. If you can't ship through goods through Russia and you want to keep as part of the international trade route, you're going to have to find something else. Something else is this route that China and the European Union have devised that runs through Central Asia that people call the middle corridor, TransCastian international route. Uh there's a number of names for it.
>> Bruce Paneer was our guest today here on TVP World. Thank you very much for joining us and as always for sharing your insight and experience.
>> Great to be here. Thank you.
>> And for this episode of Eastern Express, it's the end of the line. Please stay with us here on TVP World for more latest news updates and commentary.