Turkmenistan Moving Quickly to Become Major Sea Power on Caspian

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 22 – Until the last few years, discussions of Central Asia often ignored Turkmenistan because its policy of strict neutrality was accompanied by extraordinarily tight control over information about what it was doing. Nowhere was that more true than in the case of its ships on the Caspian, both civilian and military.

            That began to change in 2021-22 when Ashgabat became more active on the international front and took steps to build up its shipping capacity on the Caspian (turkic.world/en/articles/turkmenistan/283953 and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/01/russia-not-keeping-up-with-naval-build.html).

            But at that time, it had only about 20 merchant ships and 16 naval vessels, all of which were small cutters and thus not in a position to pose a serious challenge to its neighbors or to withstand a challenge from them (jamestown.org/program/russias-caspian-flotilla-no-longer-only-force-that-matters-there/).

            This month, Ashgabat has taken two significant steps that appear likely to change that. On the one hand, it has contracted with a Dutch company to modernize its Caspian port of Turkmenbashi; and on the other, it has agreed to have South Korean yards build more ships (casp-geo.ru/kompaniya-van-oord-gotova-k-modernizatsii-porta-turkmenbashi/ and casp-geo.ru/turkmeniya-i-koreya-rasshiryayut-sotrudnichestvo-v-sudostroenii/).

            These moves will make it a more credible force on the Caspian and at the very least mean that Turkmenistan’s navy and merchant marine can no longer be ignored in any discussion of that body of water.