The estranged former son-in-law of Kazakhstan's president has been found hanged in a Vienna jail cell, after an eight-year effort by the Central Asian government to bring him home to face murder and racketeering charges.

Facing early elections, Kazakhstan has been steadfast in refusing to devalue the tenge but the dangers of an over-valued currency are already evident and may ultimately force official action. Kazakhstan's biggest trade partners, notably Russia, have seen their currencies fall sharply against the dollar in the past year. On the weekend, fellow ex-Soviet energy exporter Azerbaijan became the latest to devalue.

Moves are afoot in Kazakhstan to hold a snap presidential election. Proponents say an early election would give incumbent strongman Nursultan Nazarbayev a fresh mandate as the country faces a slumping economy and regional geopolitical tensions over the Ukraine conflict.

Kazakhstan's slowing economy is pinching the country's industrial heartland. Several industrial behemoths have announced cutbacks that they blame on a toxic mix of factors hitting their bottom lines, from falling commodity prices to an overvalued tenge. And as the enterprises pass the losses onto their workers, Astana is looking on anxiously, with memories of violent unrest in Kazakhstan's oil fields still fresh.

Russia's post-Soviet security bloc will work to build up the capacity of other member states to produce substitutes for Ukrainian weaponry, the bloc's top official announced.

Conservative MPs in Britain will today launch a campaign to force Tony Blair to reveal how much he earns - and continue to declare who pays him for the rest of his life. The Tory MP Andrew Bridgen is tabling a Commons motion arguing that the rules that apply to serving MPs about disclosing their income should also apply to former prime ministers.

In this instalment of our series looking at Russia's relations with the countries along its border, we reach Kazakhstan, Moscow's closest ally in central Asia. Region specialist Julia Kusznir tells a story of two countries bound together by mutual dependency, but with one or two telling cracks at the edges.

In the current volatile energy market, Italy has again bet big on hydrocarbon-rich Kazakhstan, trying to re-cement its cooperation with the Central Asian republic. The bilateral partnership had been strained over the past two years by delays with the large-scale Kashagan oil field development venture, and the fallout from a diplomatic scandal.

To get a sense of why the world this month welcomed the Eurasian Economic Union with such resounding silence, look back to late August. As his country began its ongoing march into economic crumble, Russian President Vladimir Putin fielded a question at the Seliger Youth Camp. A young woman wanted the president's thoughts on the geopolitical turbulence surrounding Russia—not from the Russia-backed separatists scorching eastern Ukraine, but from apparently ignorant Kazakhs to the south.