At the end of this year Kyrgyzstan takes up a two-year term on the UN Security Council, and its president came to the General Assembly in a mood to settle accounts. On September 22, Sadyr Japarov stood at the rostrum in New York and aligned his small Central Asian republic with China on the matter of remaking the United Nations, called Western sanctions a weapon against the weak, and thanked Donald Trump — personally, by name — for defunding the organisations that document his own government’s abuses. It was a busy speech.
The reform demand was specific. “Today the world has changed,” Japarov said, and the Security Council should change with it. “It would be fair to give the African continent, with a population of over 1 billion, two permanent seats, and Latin America one permanent seat.” The council today has fifteen members, five of them permanent: the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China. Beijing, casting itself as a developing nation, has long held that the council “should not become a club of big or rich countries” and that it needs “equitable reform.” The Trump administration, broadly antagonistic to the UN system, resists expansion. London and Paris favour it, but their list — Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, plus permanent African representation — would seat three governments whose relations with Beijing range from cool to openly fraught. A German Foreign Ministry statement in early 2026 put the differences on the record: human rights, individual freedoms, economic matters, the validity of international law.
Japarov is not the only voice at this Assembly making the case. Africa has renewed its claim to two permanent seats and the veto, for as long as the veto exists. The arithmetic of who approves remains what it has always been: the five who would be diluted must consent to the dilution.
Then came the sanctions. Without naming names, Japarov denounced Washington, London and Brussels for what he called “unjustified” measures against Kyrgyzstan. The record behind the euphemism runs like this: in April the European Union imposed its first-ever anti-circumvention sanctions on Bishkek, banning exports of certain dual-use electronic components after determining that Kyrgyzstan was helping Russia evade Western sanctions by re-exporting goods with potential military uses. The United States has sanctioned specific Kyrgyz entities over alleged sanctions-busting. Sanctions, Japarov told the hall, are “a tool for interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states,” a way “to put pressure on smaller countries such as Kyrgyzstan, trying to force them to negotiate on certain issues and issuing ultimatums.”
Sovereignty was the word of the afternoon. It is worth tracking where it went next, because Japarov then turned to praise. He commended Trump for the steps taken after returning to the presidency in early 2025 — the drastic cuts to State Department and USAID funding for NGOs and independent non-profit media worldwide, ending with USAID abolished as an independent agency. In Japarov’s telling, these organisations were never builders of civil society. They were malign actors pushing agendas that undermined state-building.
Trump’s decisions have created conditions for strengthening the sovereignty of states and their independent choice of their own development path. Therefore, I would like to take this opportunity today to express my gratitude to Mr. Trump for ending funding for NGOs.
The speech, in other words, contained its own rebuttal. The United States infringes Kyrgyz sovereignty with its sanctions; the United States has strengthened Kyrgyz statehood by removing the pesky observers. Both things were said, on the same afternoon, from the same rostrum. The contradiction was not concealed. It did not need to be.
What the funding cuts did, among their major consequences, was severely weaken the ability of non-profit watchdogs to hold governments to account for rights abuses and authoritarian practice. Freedom House, in its most recent country report, classifies Kyrgyzstan as “not free.” Its assessment: “Both the judiciary and extralegal violence have since been used to sideline President Japarov’s political opponents and media and civil society critics.”
In December, Kyrgyzstan takes its elected seat at the council table, two years of it, next to the five permanent chairs. The president has said what he wants from the institution: two new permanent members from Africa, one from Latin America, and a world in which no one funds the organisations that keep the file on Bishkek. The gratitude, at least, has already been delivered. Mr. Trump was thanked by name.