Alexei Likhachev, head of Rosatom, at the St Petersburg Economic Forum 2017. Source: ForumSPB. The recent St Petersburg International Economic Forum was widely covered by the Russian media, partly because of the eye-catching debates in which president Vladimir Putin himself took part. In the general flood of news from the forum, the presentation given by Alexei Likhachev, the recently appointed head of Russia’s state nuclear corporation, has made few waves.
But Likhachev’s speech is significant in that it reflects a principally new approach to promoting Russian nuclear power plants on the international scene. Russia’s nukes will now be advertised as essential to mitigating climate change.
Rosatom is one of the most important instruments for promoting Russia’s geopolitical interests in other countries. The issue with nuclear power is that when a client country buys a plant, it becomes dependent on fuel supplies, servicing agreements and specialists from the providing country. In almost every case, Russia stimulates interest in these technologies by providing major loans towards plant construction costs. And the list of states where Rosatom is planning to build reactors (among them Belarus, Hungary and Iran) is generally friendly to the Russian regime.
