Rosatom is currently the only Russian company that has not been sanctioned Part 1

 The only Russian company that is not sanctioned yet (is Rosatom).

 

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is not only radically changing Europe's geopolitics, security, and worldview, but it is also bringing huge changes for Russia. And as time goes on this will become more and more noticeable. Russia is, in quantitative terms, the most sanctioned country in the world. Specifically, 2023 started with 13,600 sanctions and restrictions of all kinds on the Russian State, the country's companies as well as many oligarchs close to the Kremlin.

Of these, almost 11,000 were imposed after the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. For the sake of comparison, Iran, the second most sanctioned country in the world, has just over 4,000 sanctions and restrictions, while Syria and North Korea have 2,600 and 2,100 respectively. And that is not all. Western economies and in general most of Ukraine's allies have made gigantic efforts to progressively get rid of everything coming from Russia: its gas, its oil, the money of the oligarchs. Everything, except, one thing: supplies from the Russian nuclear sector.

We are talking specifically about Rosatom, a huge industrial group owned by the Russian government that, for now, has escaped sanctions. It has been spared for one reason: Right now, what this company offers is much more difficult to replace than hydrocarbons. So despite the enormous efforts, Zelenskiy has made morning, noon, and night to pressure his allies to sanction Rosatom as well, so far he has failed to do so.

9 January 2023, Ukraine expects the EU to include Russia's Rosatom in the next sanctions, And keep in mind, we are talking about none other than Russia's state-owned atomic energy company. And that's not all. This nuclear giant is virtually the only Russian company that we can say is truly on par with the best in the world in its sector, whether in terms of technology, competitiveness, costs, or quality.

It is something like the great exception of the Russian industrial fabric, a productive environment that is, to put it bluntly, characterized by its inefficiency, its excessive corruption, and a deep technological gap with respect to its western counterparts. But you can see that this is not the case with this company, quite the contrary.

Of course, the fact that the Western nuclear industry has been battered by anti-nuclear policies over recent decades has logically contributed to Rosatom's gain in market share.

Now then, What is Rosatom really? what do they do specifically, why haven't sanctions been imposed on this company, and could this change? In other words, are there grounds for sanctioning the Russian nuclear giant? What role does this company play in the political, economic, and military fabric of Vladimir Putin's Russia?

Well, in this article I am going to answer all these questions and a few more. Let's get started.

 

Putin's Golden Mine

 

As most of you probably already know, the fall of the Soviet Union was followed by a period of several years of deep crisis where a huge economic and industrial collapse was experienced. And obviously, the nuclear sector was no exception. Despite the fact that the Soviet Union was a huge power in civil nuclear energy.

For example, it was in the USSR that the world's first nuclear power plant to feed electricity into the grid was born. It did this in 1954. The Obninsk plant, with just 5 MW of power, made history, but that was only the beginning of a long road ahead. Since then, the Soviets have designed or built more than 60 nuclear reactors distributed throughout the country and the rest of the communist block is made up of countless satellite countries. In this way, they gained significant know-how and a good reputation, at least until the Chornobyl nuclear accident in 1986.

Then, not surprisingly, everything changed, But the fact is that when the USSR collapsed, the entire industrial fabric of the State also collapsed. Some of these traditional industries never recovered, others did, but at a much lower standard than their western competition, and others, on the other hand, were reestablished with care by the government. The latter case was precisely what happened with Rosatom. Vladimir Putin himself made it a personal priority to revive the nuclear industry.

To this end, in 2006 he enacted a law that sought to create an entire long-term strategic framework for the nuclear sector, and shortly thereafter, in 2007, Putin himself founded Rosatom as a State corporation.

Behind this decision was the Russian government's concern about the widening gap between electricity supply and demand. In other words, Rosatom, intended to solve the electricity shortage once and for all and thus prevent it from continuing to harm the economy. In addition, during the 1990s, Russia was left out of the international nuclear energy market because it did not have a reference producer. To give you an idea, between the early 1990s and the mid-2000s, more than 100 nuclear reactors were built around the globe. Russia was not able to participate in the construction and design of any of them.

In other words, Moscow understood that it was missing out on big business. So as we say around here, no sooner said than done. Rosatom was launched with an amazing financial boost from the Russian State and with Vladimir Putin one hundred percent involved in this mission. In fact, it is he himself who decides who runs this company and who also makes the most important appointments. The fact is that with this company, Russian nuclear energy has once again made headway and today it is already one of the major international players in the nuclear energy sector. But, to be clearer, it is enough for me to give you just one fact: of the 53 nuclear reactors that were under construction worldwide in mid-2022, 20 were being built by Rosatom, and of these, 17 were outside Russia. In other words, we are talking about a market share of almost 40%. France and South Korea are also building reactors outside their respective borders, but they are only involved in a couple of projects each.

 

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