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Russia’s state nuclear company aids war effort, leading to calls for sanctions

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HR King
May 29, 2001
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Russia’s state nuclear power conglomerate has been working to supply the Russian arms industry with components, technology and raw materials for missile fuel, documents show, aiding Moscow’s deadly onslaught on Ukraine and leading to calls for the company, Rosatom, to be put under sanctions.

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A letter from a Rosatom department chief, dated October 2022 and obtained by Ukrainian intelligence, refers to a recent meeting with the Defense Ministry and representatives of Russia’s military-industrial complex. It shows the state nuclear company offering to provide goods to Russian military units and to Russian weapons manufacturers that are under sanctions.

The weapons manufacturers include Almaz-Antey, a missile systems producer; NPK Tekhmash, which manufactures unguided bombs and multiple missile launch systems; Vysokotochniye Kompleksy, which makes Iskander missiles; NPO Splav, which produces the Uragan rocket launchers that fire cluster bombs; the state-owned aircraft conglomerate; and several Russian armored carrier and tank makers. Detailed descriptions of the products available for use by the Russian military and the arms industry are attached to the letter, which was provided to The Washington Post.






Rosatom has long presented itself as a civilian entity operating nuclear power plants in commercial partnerships across the globe, despite its role in also developing nuclear weapons for Russia. “Rosatom is known in the nuclear world as a civil nuclear company. That’s basically what its brand name is,” said Mark Hibbs, senior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s nuclear policy program.
But Russia’s war against Ukraine is exposing how closely the company, which has a board stacked with current and former senior officials from Russia’s security services, is intertwined with its military-industrial complex — and even Russian military operations in Ukraine.
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After Russia invaded Ukraine last year, Rosatom’s employees facilitated Moscow’s illegal seizure of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, according to Ukrainian officials and a Russian presidential decree. The plant, Europe’s largest, was cut off several times from Ukraine’s electric power grid, and the military standoff at the facility brought the world “one step away from a nuclear accident,” according to International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Mariano Grossi.


Witnesses said Rosatom employees stationed at the plant appeared to have directed some of the Russian artillery targeting the plant, while at the height of the shelling in August, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky decried the attack as “nuclear blackmail” by Moscow. The Ukrainian government said Russia was intentionally seeking to cut off the plant, which is now in cold shutdown because of the artillery fire, from supplying electricity to Ukraine.



Rosatom said in response to a request for comment that “all the claims in your request are completely untrue.”
Previous calls by Ukraine — backed by Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and Poland — to impose sanctions on Rosatom over its involvement in the seizure of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant have not led to action, but disclosures about its role in aiding Russia’s arms industry will now add to pressure to list the company.
“If Rosatom is providing support for the Russian arms industry, that’s sanctionable,” said Daniel Fried, the State Department’s sanctions coordinator until 2017.
The company has so far escaped sanctions, in part amid concerns over the potential economic fallout because of its extensive involvement in the civilian nuclear power industry across the globe, including in Western Europe and the United States. There are 18 Russian-designed nuclear power plants operating in the European Union, “and that means the Russians … have leverage over the continued operation of most of these facilities,” Hibbs said, noting that in Slovakia, Russian-designed plants produce half of the country’s electricity. The United States depends on Rosatom for about one-quarter of its enriched uranium supplies.



In addition, Rosatom controls about 30 percent of the global market for uranium enrichment and 17 percent of the market for reactor fuel, and out of the approximately 450 nuclear power plants around the world, about 20 percent of them are Russian-designed, Hibbs said. Rosatom is currently working on 23 nuclear power units across the globe, including in India, Turkey and Egypt, with its foreign order book standing at $200 billion.
An attempt to immediately unwind dependence on Rosatom for nuclear fuel supplies, waste management and other partnership agreements could cause major new energy price volatility at a time when the E.U. is only just emerging from a bruising year of soaring energy costs as it weaned itself off Russian oil and gas.
The Ukrainian government, however, has been ramping up the pressure for sanctions in recent weeks. Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, met the State Department’s sanctions coordinator, James O’Brien, on Jan. 12 to discuss Rosatom and “strengthening sanctions against individuals and legal entities that continue to support Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.”
After talks this month with European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal indicated that he expected sanctions on Rosatom to be included in the E.U.’s next package of sanctions against Russia, saying that Moscow “must be punished for attacks on Ukraine’s energy industry.”

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said revelations over Rosatom’s involvement in supplying the Russian arms industry “ring the alarm bell even more and prove that the problem is larger than previously known.”

 
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