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Rosatom boss Alexei Likhachev at a meeting with IAEA President Rafael Grossi in early February in Moscow
Photo: IMAGO/Alexei Bashkirov / IMAGO/ITAR-TASS
The export of energy sources is one of the Kremlin's most important sources of income – and the West has not been able to limit this through sanctions in all sectors.
A new evaluation by the news agency »Bloomberg« and the London-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) even shows an increase in Russian nuclear exports for the past year (click here for the report).
The authors point out that the data is incomplete because Russia has hardly published any export information since the beginning of the war.
According to the authors, Russia's state-owned company Rosatom should have earned 20 percent more with exports in 2022 than in the previous year.
It is true that Russia lost traditional customers as a result of the war.
For example, the Ukraine – for a long time a main customer for Russian nuclear technology and fuel elements – has decided not to supply Rosatom.
Slovakia and the Czech Republic are now also buying fuel rods for their Soviet-style nuclear power plants elsewhere.
High strategic importance
But elsewhere, business is obviously going well for the Russians: According to the evaluation, China increased its nuclear imports from Russia extremely last year, from a value of almost $100 million to over $450 million.
India, Turkey and Hungary also sent more money to Russia.
The government in Budapest increased its imports by around 50 percent during the war.
In addition to the oil and gas revenues, however, the nuclear business looks financially rather small for the Kremlin: According to RUSI and »Bloomberg«, total exports amounted to around one billion dollars.
However, they also point out that for the Kremlin, nuclear exports are more than just business relationships: With the construction and operation of nuclear power plants like the one in the Turkish Akkuyu, Russia is making other countries loyal to it in the long term.
Sanctioning the industry, on the other hand, is proving to be difficult for the West: Even countries like the USA are too dependent on importing fuel elements or their preliminary products from Russia or its partners like Kazakhstan (read more about the USA's dependency here ) .
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