Tag: kazakhstan

Kazakhstan jails former minister for 24 years over wife’s torture, murder | Women’s Rights News

United Nations says about 400 women die from domestic violence in Kazakhstan each year, but many cases go unreported.

Warning: This article contains details of violent domestic abuse that some may find upsetting.

Kazakhstan’s top court has sentenced a former economy minister to 24 years in prison for torturing and murdering his wife, following a widely watched trial that many saw as a test of the president’s promise to strengthen women’s rights.

Kuandyk Bishimbayev, 44, was found guilty and sentenced by the Supreme Court on Monday.

His trial, which has been broadcast live over the past seven weeks, has been seen as an attempt by authorities to send a message that members of the elite are no longer above the law.

Surveillance footage played during the trial showed Bishimbayev repeatedly punching and kicking his wife, 31-year-old Saltanat Nukenova, and dragging her by her hair, near naked, into the VIP room of a restaurant owned by his family in the country’s largest city, Almaty.

As she lay dying in the suite with no security cameras covered in her blood, Bishimbayev phoned a fortune teller, who assured him his wife would be fine. When an ambulance finally arrived 12 hours later, Nukenova was pronounced dead at the scene.

Videos were also found on Bishimbayev’s mobile phone in which he insulted and humiliated the visibly bruised and bloodied Nukenova in the hours before she lost consciousness on the morning of November 9 last year.

This June 2017 photo provided by Aitbek Amangeldy shows a selfie taken by his sister, Saltanat Nukenova, in Astana [Courtesy of Aitbek Amangeldy via AP]

President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has said he wants to build a fairer society including improved rights for women.

The case has helped rally public support behind a law criminalising domestic violence, which parliament passed last month.

Days after Nukenova’s death, her relatives launched an online petition urging authorities to pass “Saltanat’s Law” to bolster protection for those at risk of domestic violence. When the trial began, more than 5,000 Kazakhs wrote to senators urging for tougher laws on abuse, according to local media reports.

Government data show that one in six women in the Central Asian nation has experienced violence by a male partner.

According to the United Nations, about 400 women die from domestic abuse in the country each year. These figures could be higher as many cases go unreported.

During the trial, Bishimbayev admitted to beating his wife, but said some of her injuries were self-inflicted. He denied torturing or planning to murder her.

He served as the oil-rich nation’s economy minister from May to December 2016.

Bishimbayev was convicted of bribery in 2018 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, but walked free after less than three years thanks to an amnesty and parole.

Kuandyk Bishimbayev, the country’s former economy minister, is escorted into court in Astana, Kazakhstan. [File: The Kazakhstan Supreme Court Press Office Telegram channel via AP]

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Mass evacuations as floods in Russia’s Kurgan region set to peak | Floods News

Kurgan and Tyumen regions of Russia, and parts of Kazakhstan, are threatened by some of the worst flooding in history.

Authorities in Russia are warning people to evacuate affected areas as Russia’s Kurgan and Tyumen regions and swaths of northern Kazakhstan are flooded. Tens of thousands have already abandoned their homes.

Flooding is expected to peak on Monday in Kurgan, a region of 800,000 people at the confluence of the Ural Mountains and Siberia, as the Tobol River swelled with meltwater and burst its banks, rising to 6.31 metres (20.7 feet) in the main city.

Russia and neighbouring Kazakhstan have been grappling with some of the worst flooding in living memory after very large snowfalls melted swiftly amid heavy rain over land which was already waterlogged before winter.

Kurgan Governor Vadim Shumkov said there was almost a “sea” of water approaching the area and fresh rainfall was making the situation worse.

“The city of Kurgan itself will be next,” Shumkov said.

“The flow of the Tobol is accelerating. The water level in it is constantly rising,” he added, urging his countrymen to “leave the flooded areas immediately”.

However, he said some were refusing to evacuate.

More than 7,100 people were evacuated on Sunday from several hundred residential buildings that had been flooded, state news agency RIA Novosti reported, citing Russia’s Ministry of Civil Defence, Emergencies and Disaster Relief, as the waters threatened 62 settlements and 4,300 homes.

Cars move through a flooded part of a road in a city in northern Kazakhstan close to the border with Russia [File: Evgeniy Lukyanov/AFP]

The Kurgan and Tyumen regions are threatened the most by the floods, and measures are being taken to address those risks, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday.

“Waves of large water are coming towards the Kurgan region, the Tyumen region,” he told reporters.

“A lot of work has been done there, but we know that the water is treacherous, and therefore there is still a danger of flooding vast areas there.”

Water levels in the rivers of the Tyumen region could reach all-time highs, RIA reported, quoting regional Governor Aleksandr Moor as saying.

Flooding elsewhere

In Kazakhstan, where more than 108,000 have been evacuated since floods began last month, waters submerged more than 1,000 additional homes in the city of Petropavlovsk on Sunday, forcing the evacuation of more than 4,500 people.

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said earlier this month that this was the country’s worst natural disaster for the last 80 years.

The Tobol, a tributary of the Irtysh, rose 23cm (9 inches) in the four hours to 6am (01:00 GMT) on Monday, regional authorities said.

Floods were also inundating homes in the Tomsk region in the southwestern part of Siberia, regional officials said on Telegram.

Almost 140 houses near the city of Tomsk, which is the regional administrative centre, were underwater on Monday and 84 people were evacuated.

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Kremlin warns floods may worsen as Kazakhstan, Russia evacuate 100,000 | Floods News

Water levels on rivers in Russia and Kazakhstan continue to rise and flood whole villages and cities, with more than 100,000 people evacuated and the Kremlin warning a “very, very tense” situation was expected to worsen.

Fast-melting snow and ice has caused rivers in Russia’s southern Urals, western Siberia as well as northern Kazakhstan to reach unprecedented heights, threatening major cities.

Moscow and Astana have been battling the rising rivers for more than five days, with both declaring a state of emergency and saying the floods were the worst in decades. “The situation is very, very tense,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “The water is continuing to rise. Large [amounts of] water are coming to new regions.”

Peskov said President Vladimir Putin thus far had no plans to visit the flood zone, saying he was being briefed all the time.

Neighbouring Kazakhstan on Wednesday said that it had evacuated 96,272 people since the start of the floods – a figure 10,000 higher than the day before.

Russia said it had evacuated more than 7,700 people, mostly from the worst-hit Orenburg region.

The Ural River had already almost entirely flooded the city of Orsk and had now reached the streets of the regional capital Orenburg.

Officials in the city of 550,000 people said water levels had risen 81cm (32 inches) over the last 24 hours.

The city had not seen such floods since at least 1947, local officials said.

The Ural River depth in Orenburg stood at 996cm (33 feet) on Wednesday morning, well above the “critical level” of 930cm (30.5 feet).

“According to expert forecasts, today it will rise again by another 30-70 centimetres [12-28 inches],” the city administration warned on Telegram. It called on all residents in potential flood areas to “leave immediately”.

In Orsk, rescuers published images of themselves travelling through flooded streets and rescuing kittens from roofs.

Floods are also expected to worsen in the western Siberian city of Kurgan – near the Kazakh border, where 300,000 people live and where the Tobol River has also been swelling.

Local emergency services published images of residents and workers putting bags of sand on the river banks as sirens rang out across the city.

Authorities said the river had risen by 23cm (9 inches) in a day.

Russia’s Emergency Minister Alexander Kurenko was visiting the neighbouring Tyumen region, also affected by the floods.

He said the situation was more “stable” there but instructed officials to warn locals of rising water “on time”.

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Russia, Kazakhstan evacuate 110,000 people as record floods set to worsen | Floods News

Kremlin says weather forecast is ‘unfavourable’ with western Siberia expecting peak flooding in three to five days.

More than 110,000 people have been forced to evacuate in Russia and Kazakhstan after fast-melting snow swelled the Ural River, Europe’s third-longest, causing it to burst its banks and flood cities and towns along its path.

More than 97,000 people were evacuated in Kazakhstan alone, the emergencies ministry said on Wednesday, while at least 12,000 people have been moved to safety in Russia, mainly from the worst-hit Orenburg region.

A spokesperson in the Kazakh ministry said they were monitoring the situation in the Russian city of Orsk and water levels in the Ural River, which flows through Orsk and Kazakhstan, then into the Caspian Sea.

Both countries have been battling the rising waters for more than five days and declared a state of emergency. The Kremlin said the worst of the flooding was still to come in some parts of the Ural and Siberian regions.

Fast-melting snow and ice have caused rivers in Russia’s southern Urals, western Siberia and northern Kazakhstan to reach unprecedented heights, threatening many settlements.

The Ural burst through embankments in Orsk on April 5 and has reached the streets of the regional capital Orenburg, a city in central Russia with a population of 550,000 where hundreds of homes were flooded.

The city had not seen such floods since at least 1947, local officials said, calling the rising water “completely unprecedented”.

The worst hit areas in Russia are just to the south of the Ural Mountains, about 1,200km (750 miles) east of Moscow. Emergencies have been declared in the Orenburg and Kurgan regions of the Urals and in the Tyumen region of Siberia.

In Kurgan, a region that straddles the Tobol River near the border with Kazakhstan, 4,500 people were evacuated and fears grew that thousands more would need to be moved out. Sirens were heard warning people to evacuate immediately.

The floods are also expected to worsen in Kurgan, home to some 300,000 people, as the Tobol River swells.

“The forecast is unfavourable,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “The water level continues to rise in flood zones, large amounts of water are coming to new regions.”

“The situation is very, very tense,” Peskov added.

In western Siberia, the largest hydrocarbon basin in the world, the peak flooding is expected in three to five days, as well as in some areas around the Volga, Europe’s largest river, according to Russia’s emergencies ministry.

In a phone call on Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Kazakh counterpart Kassym-Jomart Tokayev pledged to cooperate in battling the floods.

The Russian opposition criticised Putin for not visiting the affected areas. The Kremlin said he had no plans yet to visit the flood zone and was being regularly briefed on the situation.

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Russia evacuates 4,000 people after dam bursts, floods near Kazakh border | Weather News

Authorities warn of dangerous water levels on the Ural river and open an investigation into the dam breach.

Russia said it has evacuated more than 4,000 people in the Orenburg region near the Kazakhstan border due to flooding after a dam burst.

The Orenburg governor’s office said on Saturday that “4,208 people, including 1,019 children” had been evacuated and more than 2,500 homes were affected by floods that caused the dam to give way on Friday following torrential rain.

Governor Denis Pasler said the flood had reached its “peak”, adding that the situation was especially difficult in Orsk, a border city of 230,000 people.

Officials said on Saturday that some 2,000 people were evacuated from their homes in Orsk alone. Orsk is located in the Ural mountains’ Orenburg region.

But the authorities said that the situation was difficult throughout the region and warned of dangerous water levels on the Ural river in the main city of Orenburg.

People use boats to evacuate from Orsk, Russia [Administration of the city of Orenburg Telegram Channel via AP Photo]

Video footage published by the emergency services ministry showed residents being helped into lifeboats, wearing life jackets. Thousands of homes were submerged, Russian news agencies reported.

Russia also opened a criminal case for “negligence and violation of construction safety rules” over the burst dam, which was built in 2014.

The local prosecutor’s office said the dam had been breached due to poor maintenance, according to Russian news agencies.

Rescuers evacuate residents during a flood in Orsk, Orenburg region, Russia [Russian Emergencies Ministry/AFP]

Several regions in the Urals and western Siberia have been affected by floods at the start of spring, and also parts of Kazakhstan.

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said the flooding may be Kazakhstan’s largest natural disaster in terms of scale and impact for 80 years.

“We must learn all the lessons from these large-scale floods,” he said.

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Russian Soyuz rocket with 3 astronauts blasts off to ISS, days after glitch | Space News

The successful take off to the International Space Station follows an aborted launch on Thursday after a voltage drop in a power source.

A Russian Soyuz rocket carrying three astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) blasted off on Saturday, two days after its launch was aborted at the last minute.

The spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson, Russian Oleg Novitsky and Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus launched smoothly from the Russian-leased Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan.

The space capsule atop the rocket separated and went into orbit eight minutes after the launch. It then began a two-day, 34-orbit trip to the space station.

The three astronauts are to join the station’s crew, NASA astronauts Loral O’Hara, Matthew Dominick, Mike Barratt, and Jeanette Epps and Russians Oleg Kononenko, Nikolai Chub, and Alexander Grebenkin.

Novitsky, Vasilevskaya and O’Hara are to return to Earth on April 6.

The space station, which has served as a symbol of post-Cold War international cooperation, is now one of the last remaining areas of collaboration between Russia and the West amid tensions following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

NASA and its partners hope to continue operating the orbiting outpost until 2030.

Russia has continued to rely on modified versions of Soviet-designed rockets for commercial satellites, as well as crews and cargo to the space station.

Crew members of the expedition Oleg Novitsky, bottom, Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus, top, and Tracy Dyson, centre, board the Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, on March 23, 2024 [Yuri Kochetkov/Pool via Reuters]

Aborted launch

The launch had been planned for Thursday, but was halted by an automatic safety system about 20 seconds before the scheduled liftoff.

The head of the Russian space agency, Yuri Borisov, said a voltage drop in a power source triggered the launch to be aborted.

The aborted launch was a significant mishap for the Russian space programme.

It followed an October 2018 launch failure when a Soyuz rocket carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos’s Alexei Ovchinin to the ISS failed less than two minutes after the blastoff, sending their rescue capsule into a steep ride back to a safe landing.

Hague and Ovchinin had a brief period of weightlessness when the capsule separated from the malfunctioning Soyuz rocket at an altitude of about 50km (31 miles), then endured gravitational forces of six to seven times more than is felt on Earth as they came down at a sharper-than-normal angle.

The 2018 launch failure was the first such accident for Russia’s manned programme in more than three decades.

If the launch had gone as scheduled on Thursday, the journey would have been much shorter, requiring only two orbits. Docking is now expected at 15:10 GMT on Monday.

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Kazakhstan’s CBDC to See Calculated, Phased Roll-Out Between 2023-2025: Report

The experiments with Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) have picked-up pace around the world, and Kazakhstan is no different. The central Asian nation, which is a hotspot for crypto miners, has decided to take slow steps in devising and rolling-out its CBDC — that essentially is Kazakhstan’s fiat currency in a digital avatar on blockchain. At present, the unnamed CBDC is under trial and has entered the second phase of testing under the oversight of the National Bank of Kazakhstan (NBK).

The fresh updates on Kazakhstan’s CBDC plans were revealed by the representatives from the NBK, Cointelegraph said in its report.

The nation is looking to base its CBDC on the BNB Chain, which is the blockchain network developed by Binance crypto exchange. Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance, had confirmed the development earlier in October.

With the launch of its CBDC, Kazakhstan is exploring the possibilities of expanding financial inclusion for its citizens.

In addition, the nation also wants to elevate its game in digitising its economy to stabilise its global standing.

“Taking into account the need for technological improvements, infrastructure preparation, development of an operating model and a regulatory framework, it is recommended to ensure a phased implementation over three years,” Cointelegraph quoted an official document from the NBK as saying.

The introduction of this CBDC into commercial financial systems is expected to attain completion by the last phase of 2025.

On a wider scale as well, Kazakhstan is collaborating with Binance to co-develop the next phase of the crypto sector.

The US-based exchange is designing Its Web3 hub in Kazakhstan, details of which were discussed between Zhao and Kazakhstan president Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev.

Meanwhile, the central Asian nation joins several other countries like India, China, and the UK in making progress with its CBDC.

Since blockchain is a ‘distributed ledger’ technology, information saved as blocks on the network are largely accessible and unchangeable that makes data storage transparent and reliable.

CBDC transactions, under the management from central banks around the world, will leave behind digitally permanent track records, which would help nations avoid financial frauds.

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Binance to Set Up Regional Office in Kazakhstan, Intends to Co-Develop Crypto Laws

Binance crypto exchange has signed an agreement with the government of Kazakhstan intending at fostering the crypto and Web3 culture. Kazakhstan’s Financial Monitoring Agency is looking to have Binance provide insights on framing laws around the crypto sector. Both the entities plan to target illicit activities around the virtual digital assets (VDAs) sector. As per The Block, Kazakhstan will house Binance’s regional headquarters and work on co-creating crypto regulations in the region.

Binance has been taking efforts to expand its crypto literacy and training programme among law-enforcement officers around the world. Its hub in Kazakhstan will usher this effort in the region, which houses a big number of crypto miners.

Under the ‘Global Law Enforcement Training Programme’, Binance will connect police officers in different parts of the world to skilled Web3 professionals who would run trainings on ways to combat potential crypto crimes as well as ways to tackle the aftermath.

Binance, which aims to become the most licenced crypto exchange in the world, entered the Kazakhstan market just two months ago, in August.

The company was granted the relevant licences by the Astana Financial Services Authority.

Back in May, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao had met Kazakhstan president Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev.

At the time, the exchange giant had also entered an agreement with the Ministry of Digital Development of Kazakhstan to bolster Web3 boom.

Meanwhile, Zhao has shared his excitement on the development with his seven million Twitter followers.

Binance is also coordinating with Nigeria to establish a special economic zone, powered by the crypto sector. This crypto hub in Nigeria will make for the only such entity to exist in all of West Africa. This initiative is also being supported by the Nigeria Export Processing Zones Authority (NEPZA).

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