US President Donald Trump will host all five Central Asian leaders in Washington on Thursday for the first time, a few months after they held separate summits with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping.

The West has upped its interest with the resource-rich region, where Moscow’s traditional influence has been questioned since the Kremlin’s Ukraine invasion and where China is also a major player.

– Race for influence –

Since the Ukraine war, the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have stepped up contacts with other countries in the so-called “C5+1” format.

Washington and the European Union have intensified their diplomacy with the landlocked countries that gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, with a first US-Central Asia su

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