Turkmenistan was repeatedly invoked – and in a pejorative way – as voting in Russia’s presidential election closed over the weekend.
With his 87.3 percent of the vote, President Vladimir Putin has now come to look like his fully authoritarian Central Asian peers, commentators noted.
Fantastical electoral results in Turkmenistan are a sui generis affair, though.
In the 2017 polls, for example, ex-Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov won 97.7 percent of the vote. The intent of such galactic figures is not to signal popular consensus but to snuff out the possibility of a conversation at the outset.
It was for this reason that it was mildly intriguing to see how Berdymukhamedov’s handpicked successor, his son Serdar, managed in 2022 to garner a mere 73 percent of ballots cast – far less than what even Putin managed.
The relevant parallel there is with Dmitry Medvedev, the Kremlin throne-warmer who secured a similar-looking 70.3 percent of the vote in the 2008 presidential election, while Putin ran things from the prime minister’s office. And just as the Putin-Medvedev pair were derisively referred to as Russia’s ruling tandem, so the Berdymukhamedovs are now jointly running Turkmenistan. The older Berdymukhamedov does so in his bespoke capacity as National Leader.
In spite of these commonalities, Turkmenistan has unwittingly shown up their fellow election-massagers in Russia. Ahead of the vote, the Russian diplomatic mission revealed that “tens of thousands” of Russian citizens are registered on their books. Polling stations were set up across five Turkmen cities to accommodate the potential demand. In the event, however, only 2,750 people cast their ballot, down from more than 4,000 in 2018.
Confusingly, RFE/RL’s Turkmen service, Radio Azatlyk, produced another set of numbers. Citing data from the Russian Central Election Commission website (which has been mostly inaccessible over the past few days), the outlet reported that turnout in Turkmenistan was 95 percent and that more than 98 percent of those ballots were cast for Putin.
Either way, President Berdymukhamedov (the younger) congratulated Putin on his victory, which he described as “an indication of the high level of trust placed on you and a recognition of your services to the country.”
As is so often the case, gas was high on the agenda at the Cabinet meeting on March 15. Addressing the meeting, Batyr Amanov, the deputy prime minister with the portfolio for overseeing the oil and gas industry, said that state-run Turkmengaz is carrying out what he termed “targeted work” to increase the volume of natural gas production. Turkmengaz is focusing specifically on ramping up output of sulfur-free gas, which is less corrosive and consequently more straightforward to transport and store.
The other problematic aspect of high-sulfur natural gas is how it produces noxious sulfur dioxide when the gas is burned. Removing sulfur compounds, meanwhile, is an energy-intensive process of the kind that Turkmenistan would like to avoid as it tries to adopt the cloak of a more conscientious fossil fuel producer.
Turkmenistan produced 80.6 billion cubic meters of gas in 2023, a 2.9 percent increase on the year before.
On the subject of gas transportation, the exasperating pace of progress on the trans-Afghan TAPI pipeline came up again this past week, when India’s recently appointed ambassador in Ashgabat, Madhumita Hazarika Bhagat, reasserted her government’s active interest in the project happening.
“We hope that this project will be implemented very soon,” Bhagat told a journalist from SNG.Today news website.
The sense of hazy listlessness evoked by these remarks may trouble Turkmenistan.
Radio Azatlyk on March 12 cited its sources as saying that Turkmengaz has sent “thousands” of energy industry laborers and technicians to Afghanistan for three months to work on building TAPI. The urgency is such that the workers are not even required to have foreign travel passports, the broadcaster reported.
“They said that everyone should be in Afghanistan by March 15,” the source said.
This outcome was semaphored earlier this month when Muhammetmyrat Amanov, chief executive of the Ashgabat-based TAPI Pipeline Limited Corporation, was reported as saying that Turkmenistan is working with the Taliban-run government on “implementation of a strategy for the construction of a 150-kilometer section of the [trans-Afghan TAPI] gas pipeline” to Herat.
It is challenging to square this solicitous conduct from Turkmenistan with the news that Afghanistan has begun work on the second phase of the Qosh-Tepa canal, which some experts worry may end up diverting up to 20 percent of water from the Amu Darya River on which Turkmenistan also heavily depends. In an article published on March 18, ToloNews cited a contractor as saying that the canal would have the “capacity to transport approximately [6.5] million cubic meters of water per second."
When Turkmen Foreign Ministry officials met with a visiting Taliban delegation earlier this month, they gingerly suggested adopting a “science-based approach to drawing water from transboundary rivers” and the enlistment of “highly qualified personnel” to properly manage the canal now under construction. If the Afghans paused for thought, they did not do it for very long.
On March 14, President Berdymukhamedov met with Mark Bowman, the vice president for policy and partnerships at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. A government readout of this exchange had Bowman voicing approbation for how Turkmenistan has improved its financial and banking system, as well as adopting policies to ensure economic stability.
Berdymukhamedov in turn dangled the idea of the EBRD getting involved in sustainable energy and transportation projects in Turkmenistan. In a point of strong relevance to the Afghan canal initiative, Ashgabat appears interested in tapping EBRD money and expertise to integrate more water-saving technologies in the agriculture sector.
All well and good, but EBRD engagement has shown limited results so far. Back in the dreamy days when it was authored, the lender’s Turkmenistan Country Strategy 2019-2024 envisioned all manner of beneficial outcomes, such as robust private sector growth, improvements to the business environment, and greater energy efficiency and environmental protections. But the fact that investments from the bank itself have dwindled away in the past couple of years suggests they do not think much progress has been achieved.
Not to say there is not strong opportunity for doing business. It is just the kind of business that is the problem.
Internet blocking has, unaccountably, become even worse. Amsterdam-based Turkmen.news reported on March 14 that yet more IP address subnets are being made inaccessible. In layman’s terms, this just means more online space is off-limits to Turkmen internet users. The situation goes beyond state censorship, however. Officials in state cybersecurity departments are reportedly monetizing censorship by selling access to unblocked IP addresses and creating their own VPN services, and blocking others at the same time so as to eliminate competition.
This ability to turn a public issue into a private business opportunity is an embrace of market rules after a fashion.
