The first one constitutes thousands of fearsome weapons that could wipe humanity off the map and destroy the world several times over. The other is more powerful. Russia’s civilian nuclear program remains one of Moscow’s most durable instruments of power and prestige, and the past 72 hours alone offer three concrete examples.
On Tuesday, NATO member Turkey announced it wants Russia to build several nuclear power plants. On Wednesday, while U.S. missiles struck targets in Iran, Russian officials handed Tehran’s representatives a draft agreement to build a series of small nuclear reactors. And on Thursday morning, Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom inked a deal with Kazakhstan to restore nuclear power to Central Asia’s largest state for the first time since 1999.
At a time when the United States and Europe are exploring the limits of non-military action to isolate Russia, Moscow’s mastery of civilian nuclear energy offers the Kremlin a unique point of leverage. It lets Russia project power and embed itself inside infrastructure foreign governments may depend upon for decades. Nuclear weapons are built primarily so they don’t have to be used.
Rosatom’s reactors are designed to operate every day, for generations, and are very difficult for the West to disarm. For the past four years, the West has concentrated on dismantling the instruments of Russian power to discourage Putin from waging war in Ukraine. Sanctions on oil and gas exports—the backbone of Russia’s economy and principal source of funding for its war effort in Ukraine—are perhaps the best example of this.
Western powers have squeezed the oil revenues that fill the Kremlin's coffers by capping oil prices, blacklisting the tankers carrying the oil, and hunting the shadow fleet built to evade those restrictions. The logic is simple: oil is a good Russia sells for money. Nuclear power is different.
Through Rosatom, Russia can put its technology, engineers, fuel and financing at the heart of another country’s critical infrastructure—and keep them there for decades. The scale of Rosatom’s influence in the customer country, and by extension the influence of the Kremlin, depends on the contract. Sometimes it operates like a specialist contractor.
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