Astana, 29 October. First Deputy Prime Minister Nurlybek Nalibayev held a meeting on developing Petropavlovsk airport, discussing upgrades to its infrastructure, new routes and growth in passenger and cargo traffic, the government said; in 2025 the airport served 132,500 passengers, 6.5 times more than in 2021.
The meeting was attended by the governor of North Kazakhstan Region, deputy ministers of transport and energy and the head of Kyzyl-Zhar International Airport LLP, which operates the airport. In recent years the refuelling complex there has been restored and restrictions on night flights lifted. Plans include rebuilding the runway, new international routes, stable supplies of aviation fuel and multimodal logistics infrastructure — linking air, rail and road freight. The government named neither timelines nor costs.
The meeting also discussed regional airports with low traffic: how to keep them running steadily, upgrade their infrastructure and expand their route networks. State bodies were instructed to implement the planned projects on time; which airports and which projects was not specified.
The 6.5-fold growth partly reflects a low base. In 2021 Petropavlovsk airport worked intermittently: from 1 December 2021 its airworthiness certificate was suspended, and Qazaq Air cancelled all flights to the city until the end of the year, while planned Petropavlovsk — Omsk — Novosibirsk flights disappeared from the schedule. By a calculation based on government data, the airport served about 20,000 passengers in 2021.
What it means: Kazakhstan’s northernmost regional capital, long almost cut off from regular air services, has won its passengers back in four years, and the government now sees its airport as part of the transit network rather than just a local facility.
Who benefits: Residents of North Kazakhstan Region gain more flights and night departures instead of a trip to Astana or Kokshetau. Airlines and logistics firms gain a new hub near the Russian border. The budget will have to invest in the runway and infrastructure; the cost has not been named.
Background: Petropavlovsk lies about 60 km from the Russian border; the nearest large Russian cities are Kurgan, Omsk and Tyumen. The airport was already rebuilt with state money in the second half of the 2010s: in 2015 runway repairs began with 4 billion tenge from the government reserve, and the terminal was later renovated. In his Address of 28 October, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev named airport construction among the tasks of the infrastructure programme.
We have also reported that the Address provides 6.5 trillion tenge for the “People’s Construction” drive.
