Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan border

A Soviet line becomes a border

The border is a legacy of the Soviet era. While the Kyrgyz and Uzbek republics were both part of the Soviet Union, who owned which land was a formality, even as the lines were chopped and changed.^[2] When the Soviet Union broke up, those administrative lines became international borders and left the Fergana Valley full of enclaves and disputed stretches, with Sokh the best known.^[3]

Relations after 1991 were repeatedly soured by disagreements over the line, and local communities sometimes clashed over rival claims to land.^[2] In the early 2000s the region was known for mined frontiers and closed border crossings.^[3]

Settling it, piece by piece

Things changed after Shavkat Mirziyoyev became Uzbekistan’s president in 2016. Border crossings reopened, and in 2017 the two countries agreed most of their border of nearly 1,400 km, leaving the hardest sections for later.^[3]

The hardest was the Kempir-Abad reservoir, known in Uzbekistan as the Andijan reservoir. The Soviet government built it on the Kyrgyz side of the line in the 1970s to supply water to Soviet Uzbekistan.^[1] In March 2021 Kyrgyzstan’s security chief, Kamchybek Tashiev, announced a preliminary deal that would give Uzbekistan the reservoir, and protests followed: critics pointed out that the reservoir’s land had never been in dispute.^[1]

On 23–24 October 2022 more than 20 members of a “Kempir-Abad Defense Committee” were arrested and later charged with organising mass unrest.^[1] Less than two weeks later the foreign ministers signed an agreement: the two countries would manage the reservoir jointly, but its land went to Uzbekistan in exchange for other disputed areas. President Sadyr Japarov signed the treaty into law on 29 November.^[1] On 27 January 2023 Mirziyoyev came to Bishkek, where the two leaders declared the delimitation complete and called it historic.^[2]

Swapping the enclaves

The 2022 deal left the enclaves unresolved. Under a 2024 land swap Barak, Kyrgyzstan’s only enclave inside Uzbekistan, went to Uzbekistan, and its people moved to a new village, Jany-Barak, in Kyrgyzstan’s Osh region.^[3] In June 2026 Kyrgyzstan announced that two Uzbek enclaves, Chongara and Tash-Tobo, had come under Kyrgyz jurisdiction, with their roughly 2,500 ethnic Kyrgyz residents to receive Kyrgyz citizenship and Uzbekistan to get equal land in return.^[3]

Uzbekistan’s larger enclaves, Sokh and Shakhimardan, remain inside Kyrgyzstan. The Diplomat notes that their size, geography and strategic importance make the same kind of swap much harder there.^[3]