As the United States, Russia, China, and Turkey seek influence in Central Asia, Uzbekistan has found the right formula to manage them.

Uzbekistan’s relationship with Russia is deepening. The Russian nuclear firm Rosatom is building the country’s first nuclear power plant, a $9.5 billion project that will tie the two countries together for decades. Moscow and Tashkent have set a $30 billion trade target for 2030 and signed a military cooperation program that runs through the same year. Millions of Uzbeks work in Russia, and the remittances they send home remain a pillar of the economy. However, China has recently replaced Russia as Uzbekistan’s largest trading partner, and Uzbek-Chinese trade appears to be on an upward trend. 

However, the United States is still trying to edge its way in. On October 18, Secretary of State Marco Rubio landed in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, with more than 200 American business leaders in tow. He met the foreign ministers of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan under the C5+1 format, which pairs Washington with the five Central Asian states. The format held its first ministerial meeting in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, in November 2015. At this year’s summit, the six governments issued a joint statement backing mineral processing inside Central Asia and the Trans-Caspian Trade Route.

Uzbekistan’s relationship with Russia, like its relationships with other regional powers seeking to gain political and economic influence, is fluid. Russia supplies nuclear power and security; China supplies industry and capital; the United States offers investment, technology, and a hedge; and Turkey offers a shared identity and a platform to use it. Each relationship gives Uzbekistan options and reduces its reliance on the others. The relationship with Russia grows in absolute terms, but its relative weight shrinks.

That strategy is evident in a single company. Uzum is Uzbekistan’s first technology unicorn, valued at $1.5 billion. Its most revealing feature is the diversity of its cap table. Equity holders include China’s Tencent, the US fund FinSight Ventures, the Anglo-American VR Capital, a UAE family office, and sovereign entities from Oman. No single investor controls the company, and no single nationality is dominant. Uzbek entrepreneur Djasur Djumaev founded the firm in 2022 and secured backing from a diversified bloc of investors whose countries of origin compete for influence in Uzbekistan.

Uzum built its business around an Uzbek problem. In a Muslim-majority country where interest-bearing debt carries religious weight, issuing a conventional credit card is a barrier to an untapped market. Uzum’s answer was a debit card with a pre-approved credit limit—money that feels like the customer’s own but functions as credit when needed. It issued more than four million cards in a year. On March 27, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev signed a law that legalizes Islamic banking. The Central Bank of Uzbekistan has since set up an Islamic Finance Council to oversee Sharia compliance. 

What Uzum does with its investors mirrors what Uzbekistan does with its sovereign partners. It selects what it needs and deliberately discards the rest. The United States, Russia, China, and Turkey each meet Uzbekistan’s needs, but each comes at a price. Tashkent manages that price by carefully balancing its partners.

The $9.5 billion nuclear plant is the clearest example of Uzbekistan’s anchored relationship with Russia. Rosatom will build the reactors, supply the fuel, train the operators, and service the plant for the reactors’ decades-long life. Buying nuclear technology is like buying military equipment; once you’ve adopted a specific technology, it’s hard to switch to other suppliers. 

Labor migration also ties the two economies together. Russia needs laborers, and Uzbek laborers need work. Deteriorating Russian demographics, driven by low birth rates, an aging population, and the war’s demand for workers and soldiers, continue to strain the Russian economy. At a historic 2.2 percent unemployment rate, Russia lacks enough workers to meet demand. 

Central Asia has long been a convenient source of labor for Russia, and Uzbekistan is one of the largest. In 2025, remittances reached roughly $18.9 billion—about an eighth of GDP. Some $12 billion came from Russia. This mutual economic reliance has been a key factor Moscow has used to pressure Tashkent to join the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), but Uzbekistan has resisted. 

Sensitive to the labor vulnerability, Uzbekistan has created alternatives. In 2024, Tashkent established a Migration Agency that certifies skills to European standards and negotiates bilateral labor deals—a framework agreement with Germany, smaller ones with Austria, Portugal, and the Netherlands, and expansion into South Korea and the Gulf. Uzbekistan is already Central Asia’s largest labor exporter to the EU. These destinations pay more and treat workers better, but cannot absorb workers at Russia’s scale. Russia remains the main destination for migrant workers. 

Another illustration of managed diversification and exploitation is the banking sector. While Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, operates in Uzbekistan, it lacks a retail license; it serves only Russian businesses. Tashkent is wary of granting a Russian state bank access to its economy because unwinding it would be difficult. While it is cautious about Russian capital, Russian talent is another matter.

TBC Uzbekistan, the country’s leading digital banking ecosystem, reaches more than half the population. It is a subsidiary of the Georgian-based, London-listed TBC Bank Group. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) each hold stakes in its Uzbek subsidiary. TBC Uzbekistan’s rise is partly built on talent from Tinkoff Credit Services (TCS), a Russian neobank founded by Oleg Tinkoff and later sold to Vladimir Potanin for a fraction of its value after Oleg Tinkoff was forced to sell his equity because of his public opposition to Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Oliver Hughes, a key manager who helped establish TCS, also left Russia after the 2022 invasion and now chairs TBC’s Uzbek business. He helped mobilize a team of talented Uzbek and Georgian bankers and data scientists to create a strong neobank in Uzbekistan. 

China is now Uzbekistan’s largest trading partner—bilateral trade reached $17.2 billion in 2025, roughly a fifth of the country’s total trade. The relationship carries a structural imbalance. China buys raw materials—gas, copper, cotton—and sells back machinery, electronics, and finished goods.

However, Uzbekistan is working to address this imbalance. A case in point is the BYD/UzAuto joint venture in Jizzakh. BYD typically owns its plants, including its largest overseas plant in Brazil. In Uzbekistan, it partnered with UzAuto, a state-owned company. The joint venture provides skills-based training and jobs for Uzbek workers, a new industrial supply chain, and manufacturing know-how. The joint venture signed its agreement in September 2023, and the first cars rolled off the line in June 2024. It has begun exporting to Kazakhstan and Afghanistan, positioning Uzbekistan as an automotive manufacturing and distribution center.

Beyond the factory floor lies a larger wager: the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway, a long-planned line that would give Uzbekistan a direct rail link to China through Kyrgyzstan. For a doubly landlocked country, the appeal is natural. The line feeds the Middle Corridor, a Trans-Caspian route that carries goods westward to Turkey and Europe while bypassing Russia, and turns Uzbekistan from a terminus into a transit state.

That corridor’s rise is itself a product of sanctions and diversification away from Russian transit, and the states along it—Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkey—have profited. It follows the same logic as the BYD plant: use Chinese engagement to build an asset that outlasts any single deal.

In November 2025, Mirziyoyev joined the presidents of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan at the 10th-anniversary C5+1 summit at the White House. The US administration announced that Uzbekistan would invest nearly $35 billion in the United States over three years and more than $100 billion over a decade. 

Given Uzbekistan’s 2025 GDP of about $150 billion, these announcements are a stretch, at best. The numbers are largely framework—rights of first refusal on mineral deposits and letters of interest rather than commitments. By this September, Investment Minister Laziz Kudratov counted a $35 billion portfolio of US agreements, with $7 billion in projects completed.

Foreign Minister Bakhtiyor Saidov and Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau signed a memorandum on critical-mineral supply chains on February 4. Two weeks later, the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) signed a Joint Investment Framework with Tashkent. The framework proposes a US-Uzbek joint holding company for minerals and infrastructure projects. The mineral agreements did not include deposits, feasibility studies, or committed capital.

DFC Chief Executive Ben Black and Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM) Chairman John Jovanovic launched a US-Uzbekistan Joint Investment Platform in Tashkent in June. Its first shortlist includes a new Tashkent international airport, a medical complex in the Fergana region, data centers, and dry ports. Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin was in Tashkent the same day for the Tashkent International Investment Forum.

US-Uzbek trade exceeded $1 billion in 2025. Uzbekistan also remains subject to the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, a 1974 trade restriction written for the Soviet Union. Senators from both parties have introduced a bill to repeal it for Central Asia. At his confirmation hearing, Rubio called the amendment “a relic of an era that’s passed.”

In December 2024, Deputy Prime Minister Jamshid Khodjaev and US Trade Representative Katherine Tai signed the protocol that closed Washington’s market-access talks on Uzbekistan’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO). Tashkent first applied to the WTO in 1994. In October, it concluded talks with Kazakhstan, and chief negotiator Azizbek Urunov announced that accession had entered its final phase. During Russian Prime Minister Mishustin’s June visit, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Pankin said the EAEU could admit Uzbekistan quickly. Tashkent has kept its observer status and appears to be prioritizing WTO entry first.

US presence gives Uzbekistan access to US power and leverage against others, particularly Russia and China, as they vie for influence in Uzbekistan. It may also influence project financing terms and standards as Tashkent negotiates with China. Tashkent also wants American technology, as demonstrated by the agreement with Amazon Leo for satellite communications and with Valmont Industries for farm technology. 

The US-Uzbek relationship carries an inherent risk of US attention deficit. US strategic policy can change every four years due to presidential election cycles, which does not bode well for projects that require long-term commitments. In Samarkand, Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Investment, Industry and Trade announced 54 agreements worth $12 billion, including companies such as Wabtec, Traxys, Trafigura, GE HealthCare, Citigroup, and BlackRock. 

Turkey offers a shared language and history. It was the first country to recognize Uzbekistan’s independence in 1991, and the relationship now runs through the Organization of Turkic States. The two governments have elevated ties to a comprehensive strategic partnership, set a $5 billion trade target, and opened a security channel—a “4+4” format that brings together the foreign, defense, and interior ministers and intelligence chiefs of both countries. 

Trade with Turkey, at around $3 billion, is a fraction of the flows with China or Russia. Its comparative advantage is serving as a westward bridge—to the Caucasus, the Mediterranean, and Europe.

Uzbekistan selectively uses the Turkic framework, as Turkey’s influence in Central Asia and the Caucasus has grown at Russia’s expense. The Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict was widely seen as the erosion of Russian influence, as Turkey backed Azerbaijan while Russian “peacekeeper” forces stood by. 

Uzbekistan plays its four powers the way a bass player anchors a free jazz set—not the loudest instrument on the stage, but the one setting the tempo the others follow. It takes Russia’s nuclear line, China’s industrial riff, Washington’s backing, and Ankara’s shared key, and holds them in a rhythm of its own making. The composition is never finished, which is exactly the sound a country makes when it means to keep improvising. When a partner pushes too hard, Tashkent drops the note; when one offers something it needs, it plays along.

Uzbekistan Airways now holds firm orders for 22 Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners. It signed for the last eight at the C5+1 summit in Washington on 6 November 2025. The State Department named Boeing among the companies for Rubio’s delegation to Samarkand.

Samarkand, Bukhara, and Tashkent traded between empires as the Persians, Mongols, Timurids, and later the Russians took turns ruling the region, and the cities outlived each one. Uzbekistan, barely three decades old as a state, is again playing empires to its own advantage, belonging to none for long.

About the Author: Adam Blanco

Adam A. Blanco is the managing director of e8Q Technologies and author of Barbershop Whispers…Russia and Barbershop Whispers…Las Améяicas, newsletters on Eurasian and LATAM geopolitics and geoeconomics. A trained international banker formerly with Dresdner Bank and Banco do Brasil, he managed commodities trade finance in Latin America and later managed Visa International’s business development in Central Asia and the Caucasus. He has worked and lived in Eurasia and Latin America, including Russia, Tajikistan, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Most recently, he has advised clients on acquiring OFAC-sanctioned Russian assets, Western corporate exits from Russia, and Cuba investment strategies. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Florida International University, an MBA from IESE Business School-Universidad de Navarra, and a Russian language certificate (TORFL-1) from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow.

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