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From the top floor of Tashkent's Hotel Uzbekistan, one of the most striking Soviet Modernist buildings in Central Asia, twenty-seven cranes can be seen stretching out against the skyline, still busy even as the sun sets on the city below. They are busy building not the Madrassas and Mosques that draw countless tourists to this country, but new glass towers of commerce - and they are funded by Chinese, Gulf and Turkish money. Below, on the city's streets, the Russian Ladas of old have been displaced by the Chinese electric cars, with the electric "Build Your Dreams" a firm, shiny favourite.
Meanwhile, in the country's second city, Bukhara, a new art biennale is in full flow and with stars such as the British artist Antony Gormley and the German Carsten Höller on its rostra, its cultural lodestar is clearly pointing westward.
It's all part of a broader cultural shift away from Moscow's shadow. These cranes, cars and canvases tell a larger story: Central Asia, perhaps most epitomised in what is unfolding here in Uzbekistan, is fast rebalancing its loyalties in the Great Game of the twenty-first century. And Russia is not the only one at the gaming table.
Colonial Drift
Tashkent's notable neutrality over Russia's invasion of Ukraine conceals a pragmatic recalibration. Like its neighbours, Uzbekistan has neither endorsed nor condemned the invasion, but it has quietly asserted sovereignty.
In April 2025, it hosted the first EU-Central Asia summit in Samarkand, a meeting that infuriated Moscow. When the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, Sergey Lavrov, complained that a new World War II memorial bore inscriptions only in Uzbek and English, a high-profile Uzbek academic responded that Uzbekistan "is not a colony." The terse responses to Lavrov symbolised a region redefining its identity. It was no longer deferential, no longer silent.
The country's economic transformation under President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has strengthened this autonomy. Since 2016, Mirziyoyev has liberalised the currency, trimmed subsidies, privatised state firms and courted foreign investment. Growth has averaged around 6 per cent annually. Construction booms at an even faster clip: 129 trillion soums (about $11 billion) of work was reported completed between January and August 2025, up nearly 8 per cent on the previous year. The state plans a new "City of the Future" east of Tashkent to house two million people across 20,000 hectares.
Elsewhere in the region, the shift is equally as clear. Kazakhstan's President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev not only refused to endorse Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but went so far as to meet Volodymyr Zelensky at the United Nations, backing international guarantees for Ukraine's sovereignty.
Closer to Europe, Armenia has suspended its defence alliance with Moscow after being left exposed in its conflict with Azerbaijan and is now seeking closer ties with Europe. Azerbaijan, for its part, has turned westward too, strengthening trade links with Turkey and welcoming Western investment in the South Caucasus corridor.
This month, the UK government lifted its long-standing arms embargo on Armenia and Azerbaijan, upgrading both countries to "strategic partners" and allowing arms exports for the first time since 1992. Meanwhile, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are laying a trans-Caspian fibre-optic cable to link with Azerbaijan by 2026, in yet another move where Central Asia quietly decouples from Russian digital networks and it turns its technological gaze westward.
In this way, Uzbekistan's approach exemplifies a wider pattern - something that Annette Bohr of the think-tank Chatham House calls Central Asia's "multi-vectoring." Regional leaders, she notes, have refined the art of telling each side what it wants to hear. With Moscow, they emphasise their fear of Western sec...