Bellona.org

Russia continues to present its nuclear sector as a pillar of strength—at home, abroad, and even in war. But a closer look at developments in our March Nuclear Digest tell a different story: one of political improvisation, slipping timelines, and growing constraints. 

Three cases from our latest digest—Ukraine, Turkey, and the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant II—show a strategy that is still moving forward, but increasingly under strain. 

Ukraine: Licensing reality into existence 

Nowhere is that strain more visible than at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, occupied by Russian troops since early in the invasion. Earlier this year, Russia’s nuclear regulator announced it had issued long-term licenses for two reactors at the besieged plant. On paper, Rosatom wishes to indicate progress. In practice, it’s something else entirely. 

There is no real license today that would allow these units to be put into operation—let alone operated for 10 years, writes Bellona expert Alexander Nikitin. 

Under normal conditions, reactor licenses are the final step in a long process of construction, testing, and safety validation. None of that has happened at Zaporizhzhia. The reactors remain in cold shutdown, dependent on fragile external power lines that continue to be disrupted by nearby fighting.  

So what are these licenses for? According to Nikitin, they are less about engineering than optics: “a forced step taken under pressure to legitimize Russian control over the station.”  

That effort may already be working. Subtle changes in how international organizations refer to the plant—dropping explicit mention of Ukraine—suggest that language is beginning to shift alongside reality. But the risks to the plant remain unchanged. Military activity continues near nuclear facilities, power supply remains unstable, and safety margins are thin. 

Even beyond Zaporizhzhia, the long shadow of war is growing. Repairs to the damaged confinement structure at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant—which was struck by a Russian drone—are expected to cost €500 million. But for now, those plans may be more aspirational than practical. 

“There is no real threat from these facilities today—and no resources to carry out such work during the war,” Nikitin notes. In other words: even nuclear safety is being triaged. 

Turkey: The Limits of Export Power 

If Ukraine shows how Russia uses nuclear tools politically, Turkey shows where the limits of that strategy begin. The Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant—Rosatom’s flagship export project—is now years behind schedule. Its first reactor was supposed to be running by 2025, but it’s not. 

Rosatom blames sanctions. Its CEO, Alexey Likhachev, has described the project as stuck in a “sanctions meat grinder.” But the consequences go deeper than delays. 

The delays are not just technical—they have legal and economic implications, writes Bellona analyst Dmitry Gorchakov.  

Akkuyu is built under a model that leaves Rosatom carrying most of the financial risk while relying on long-term electricity purchase agreements to make the numbers work. The longer the delays, the weaker Rosatom’s bargaining position becomes. 

Turkey is clearly taking note. In March, Ankara moved forward with talks on alternative nuclear technologies, including a deal with Canada’s Candu Energy. Negotiations are also ongoing with South Korea and China. What was once expected to be Rosatom’s next big win in Turkey—the Sinop project—is no longer a given. 

As Gorchakov puts it, “Sinop is now effectively an open project, without any obligations toward Rosatom.”  

Kursk II: When Dates Don’t Line Up 

Back in Russia, the story is less about geopolitics and more about transparency. 

At the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant II, the first unit has reached full power—a milestone the industry likes to highlight. At the same time, international databases list the start of construction on Unit 3 as January 31, 2026. 

But Bellona’s analysis suggests that date may not be accurate. Evidence from regional sources and site imagery indicates the “first concrete” milestone likely occurred weeks earlier, in late December 2025. That discrepancy may seem minor. But in nuclear construction, it’s not. 

“This case shows that information about the construction of Kursk-II units is being deliberately concealed,” Gorchakov writes. 

The start of construction is one of the most closely tracked benchmarks in the nuclear industry. Moving it—even by a few weeks—can obscure delays, reshape narratives, and complicate oversight. And it raises a broader question: if even basic milestones are unclear, what else is? 

Read our full article on the strange data from Kursk II here.  

The Bigger Picture 

Taken together, these cases point to a nuclear strategy that is still active—but increasingly reactive. In Ukraine, Russia is trying to regulate its way into legitimacy. In Turkey, it is losing ground in a market it once seemed to dominate. And at home, it is struggling to maintain transparency even on its own projects. 

None of this means Rosatom is in retreat. Its global footprint remains large, and its projects continue to move forward. But the corporation’s narrative of steady expansion is becoming harder to sustain. Read this and more in the new digest.  

The post Questionable licenses, delays, and obscured construction data and more in Bellona’s new nuclear digest  appeared first on Bellona.org.

Russia’s Arctic energy ambitions depend on a delicate balance: stable production, predictable shipping routes, and a logistics network that can withstand both harsh conditions and geopolitical pressure. Developments in March suggest that balance is becoming harder to maintain.

Two events highlighted in Bellona’s latest Arctic Digest—the disabling of the LNG tanker Arctic Metagas and a series of tanker detentions in European waters—underscore growing vulnerabilities in how Russia moves its Arctic oil and gas to market.

Explosion on the Arctic Metagas shadow tanker

On March 3, the LNG carrier Arctic Metagas was disabled by an explosion in the Mediterranean Sea, leaving it adrift with liquefied natural gas and heavy fuel on board. While the immediate impact was logistical, the incident also exposed a serious risk: the environmental fragility of Russia’s Arctic energy model.

A drifting LNG tanker is not just a shipping problem—it is a potential environmental emergency. Although no major spill was reported, the presence of fuel oil and LNG aboard a disabled vessel highlights what could happen if a similar incident occurred closer to Arctic waters. In such conditions, containment and cleanup operations would be far more difficult, if not impossible.

Bellona analysts have repeatedly warned that Russia lacks the capacity to respond effectively to oil spills in harsh, ice-covered environments. The Arctic Metagas incident serves as a reminder that accidents involving Arctic energy shipments are not hypothetical—they are already happening.

At the same time, the disruption triggered a chain reaction across the Northern Sea Route. Tankers rerouted away from the Mediterranean, cargo accumulated in Arctic storage, and vessels idled at sea waiting to unload.

For Bellona, this combination of logistical fragility and environmental risk is telling.

“This highlights the vulnerability of logistics for sanctioned Russian gas,” our analysts note. “Any incident involving a shadow LNG tanker can significantly slow down or halt shipments.”

But beyond logistics, the implication is broader: the expansion of Arctic LNG exports is happening in a context where both infrastructure and emergency response systems remain inadequate. In a region already under pressure from climate change, even a single accident could have outsized and long-lasting consequences.

Tanker Detentions: Pressure at Sea

At the same time, Russia’s oil exports are facing growing friction in international waters. In March, France detained the tanker Deyna, which was carrying Arctic oil from Murmansk under what authorities suspect was a falsified flag. The vessel is now under investigation, marking the second such case in recent months.

The UK has gone further, authorizing its military to inspect and detain Russian shadow fleet vessels passing through its waters, effectively raising the risks for any tanker attempting to transit key maritime chokepoints.

Bellona analysts see this as a turning point.

“There were signs of real progress toward countering the Russian shadow fleet,” we note. “If this practice becomes established and scaled up, it could significantly hinder the illegal transportation of Russian oil.”

The mechanism is simple but effective. Many of these tankers operate with questionable documentation—unclear ownership, false flags, or manipulated tracking data. Inspections and detentions introduce delays, and delays undermine the economics of Russian oil.

“Any delay disrupts deliveries, making the supplier significantly less attractive to buyers,” we point out, even when prices are low.

There is also an environmental dimension. Rather than targeting oil infrastructure directly—risking spills in fragile Arctic ecosystems—detaining vessels at sea offers a lower-risk way to constrain exports.

A System Under Strain

Taken together, the disruption of Arctic Metagas and the tightening net around shadow tankers point to a common theme: Russia’s Arctic energy model is increasingly exposed at the level of logistics.

Production continues. Icebreakers still escort vessels. Cargo still moves. But the system is becoming less predictable, less efficient, and more vulnerable to disruption—whether from a single strike in the Mediterranean or a document check in European waters.

The post Arctic gas disrupted and tankers detained: new risks for Russia’s northern energy strategy—the new Arctic Digest is out appeared first on Bellona.org.

Kursk II is one of Rosatom’s most important nuclear construction projects within Russia. Four of the most advanced and powerful units in Rosatom’s history—VVER-TOI reactors with capacities of up to 1,250 MW each—are being built there.

But this site is also the Russian nuclear power plant closest to the border with Ukraine. Likely for this reason, Rosatom is carrying out construction under conditions of limited transparency—either not publicly disclosing key construction milestones or doing so with significant delays and inconsistencies. This has led to confusion even at the level of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

To read the rest of this article, click here.

The post The curious, secretive case of the Kursk II nuclear power plant’s weird data appeared first on Bellona.org.

A version of this op-ed was first published in The Moscow Times.

For the past 40 years, the wastes of the Chernobyl site have stood as a monument to human arrogance, the danger of secrets, the plodding ineptitude of repressive regimes, and the catastrophes that occur when they all intersect.  At a remove of four decades—and after the production of an enormous scientific and cultural literature on the disaster—it’s tempting to say we’ve learned our lesson.

The word “Chernobyl” itself has passed into our collective lexicon as synonym for catastrophe, and the UN a decade ago designated April 26—the day in 1986 that Chernobyl’s No 4 reactor exploded—as an international Day of Remembrance, a dark honor that the disaster’s anniversary shares with the likes of the Holocaust and the transatlantic slave trade.

Surely—we terribly wish to say as a civilized society—we’ve put this sort of thing behind us. Right?

A Russian military drone that blew a hole in the dome protecting the world from the No 4 Reactor’s still-highly radioactive entrails suggests otherwise. In fact, as the ruby anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear accident arrives this Sunday, we’re discovering newer ways to endanger nuclear power plants—this time by making them targets of war.

Since its invasion of Ukraine commenced in February of 2022, Moscow’s troops have invaded and attacked the Chernobyl site, bombed a research reactor at Kharkiv’s Institute of Physics and Technology in Ukraine’s east, and taken over Europe’s largest civilian nuclear power plant, the six-reactor Ukrainian facility at Zaporizhzhia, claiming the facility as Russian property.  All the while, Russian supersonic missiles continue to whiz within mere kilometers of not just Chernobyl, but Ukraine’s operating Khmelnitsky nuclear power plant as well.

What’s more, all of this is becoming quite routine. In recent weeks, Washington—the same world capital that was aghast at Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian nuclear facilities—targeted Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant in an attack of its own. The rest of the world meanwhile is more or less powerless to stop it. Indeed, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency—with its vague mandate to encourage and oversee the safe and peaceful use of atomic energy—is empowered by its governing body (which includes representatives from Russia and the US) to do little more than be officially horrified. It is a posture that’s’ unequal to what’s at stake.

A view of the New Safe Confinement structure in 2016.

The Chernobyl disaster remains one of the defining moments in the twilight years of the Soviet Union. Moscow sought to obscure the disaster while quietly evacuating more than 116,000 people from the area surrounding the plant in the days after the reactor exploded. It would be Swedish authorities who finally pierced Moscow’s official silence when they announced mysterious spikes in their own radiation monitoring systems. What they detected was a plume of radioactive material ejected into the atmosphere, causing a public health emergency across Europe and leading to a skepticism toward nuclear energy that would last decades.

It was in the long shadow of the catastrophe that the Bellona Foundation was born. Founded in Norway in the years following the disaster, we emerged from a growing recognition that nuclear risks did not respect national borders, and that independent scrutiny of nuclear safety—particularly within the former Soviet Union—was urgently needed. What began as a response to secrecy and contamination in the wake of Chernobyl has since evolved into decades of work tracking nuclear hazards, advocating for transparency and environmental rights—and nearly single-handedly spearheading the cleanup of generations radioactive waste and nuclear hazards in Russia’s northwest.

The human toll of the Chernobyl explosion was likewise obscured. Officially, it stands at 31 dead—a figure many experts say is ludicrously low. In the following years, hundreds of people involved with quelling the disaster’s effects fell ill, and many eventually died. Cancer rates, especially for thyroid cancer, increased in areas heavily exposed to radiation. In later interviews, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president on whose watch the Chernobyl accident occurred, would identify the catastrophe as one of the most important factors hastening the Soviet collapse.

Forty years after that calamity, Moscow itself has wrought renewed disaster at Chernobyl. In the opening days of its invasion, Russian troops overran the Exclusion Zone—the 2,6000-square-kilometer area around the plant where radiation levels remain high and public access is limited—where their tanks and transports churned up radioactive dust. Soldiers looted and vandalized workshops necessary to the ongoing decommissioning of not only the No 4 reactor, but the plant’s three remaining reactors as well, the last of which was finally shut down in 2000.

An apartment building in the abandoned city of Pripyat, where Chernobyl’s workers lived, as seen in 2006.

The soldiers dug trenches and set fires in an area known as the Red Forest—a gnarled expanse of irradiated woodland—scorching some 14,000 hectares of land, filling the air with so much radioactive smoke that it was unsafe for firefighters to quell the blazes. Hundreds of Chernobyl workers and technicians who oversee the site’s sprawling network of spent fuel storage facilities and the enormous effort to dismantle the radioactive remnants of the exploded No. 4 reactor, were held hostage onsite.

Looting and petty destruction by Russian troops was general. Computers, dosimeters, lab tools, firefighting equipment and even appliances were stolen. Office doors were ripped off hinges, windows smashed, walls spray-painted with graffiti. Human excrement was left behind on control panels as a calling card.

After a month of marauding—and amid reports of radiation sickness among its troops—Russia abruptly withdrew on March 22, 2022, and, in a bizarrely official ceremony, handed control of the plant back to the Ukrainians. According to the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, which has financed much of the Chernobyl cleanup work since the original 1986 disaster, the Russian Army’s destructive adventure in the world’s most famous radioactive wasteland left behind some €100 million in damage.

That, however, would not be the end of it. A drone attack on Chernobyl, coming in February of 2025, ruptured the so-called New Safe Confinement, a €1.5 billion dome that has protected the No 4 reactor since 2016. Designed to replace the crumbling concrete sarcophagus poured over the remains of the reactor by Soviet liquidators, the dome houses the still ongoing removal of 200 tons of molten nuclear fuel left inside.

It’s an enormous—and enormously complicated—structure. Standing as tall as a football pitch is long and weighing more than 31,000 tons, the New Safe Confinement is the world’s largest movable object. The sarcophagus it now shelters was never built to last. By the mid-1990s, cracks had opened, leaks had formed, and the whole brittle shell was sagging under its own weight.

To avoid being exposed to radiation, the new dome structure was built about a half a kilometer away from the sarcophagus, then moved into place on rails. In addition to the securing the melted fuel, the structure protects the outside environmental from some 30 tons of highly contaminated dust and 16 tons of uranium and plutonium that continue to release high levels of radiation.

In places, the structure measures about 12 meters between its inner and outer shells, and the space between them is kept at low humidity to prevent corrosion. The outer shell keeps out the elements. The inner shell is designed to contain the radioactive dust inside the structure, especially when the cranes that are set up within it start dismantling the sarcophagus and the damaged reactor before safely disposing of the waste in smaller containers.

Ukrainian specialists overseeing the cleanup had aimed to start that dismantlement stage this year, but the drone attack has made that impossible. According to those Bellona has spoken to, none of that work can move forward until a full repair process has been completed—which is not expected until 2030.

Makeshift repairs, meanwhile, are keeping radioactive dust inside the shelter, and, almost miraculously, no radiation spikes have been recorded since the initial attack. But ongoing Russian strikes around the Chernobyl site continue to threaten the now-enfeebled structure, which the EBRD estimates will cost some €500 million to fully repair.

Naturally, the IAEA has warned again and again against such attacks and wrung its hands over the apparent normalization of military aggression against some of the most sensitive industrial sites constructed by man. But the composition of its board of governors, and its enforced apolitical stance, prevent it from censuring, or even naming, the obvious culprits. Because of this, the international body is little more than a paid mourner at the funeral of the rules-based international order.  From the attacks on Chernobyl, to the seizure of Zaporizhzhia, to the US strike on Bushehr, the agency can do little but express “deep concern.”

This paralysis of deep concern was what we had 40 years ago when a radioactive cloud of hidden origin darkened the skies over Europe and turned hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens into refugees from their own government’s secrets. One would hope that 40 years of staring into the rubble of one of humanity’s biggest mistakes would have brought us more wisdom and enlightenment.

That it hasn’t is partially a failure of collective imagination. After Chernobyl, we thought we’d seen the worst thing that could happen to a nuclear power plant. No one—not world governments, not the designers of Chernobyl’s New Safe Confinement, not the IAEA—ever accounted for deliberate military attacks on civilian nuclear power stations. It was unthinkable.

Now that it’s not, we must work together—NGOs, governments, and people alike—to make it unthinkable again. As an organization, Bellona has proposed beginning the conversation on what, exactly, international oversight for the safety of nuclear power plants should look like. It’s clear that we need a transnational agency that has the authority to do more than offer hopes and prayers when nuclear plants become military targets.

Such a system would have to emerge from the international community itself, but the time for that discussion has clearly arrived. Until it does, however, we’re left exactly where we were in 1986, watching helplessly as disaster unfolds.

The post After Chernobyl we said ‘never again.’ Then came the war. appeared first on Bellona.org.