Rosatom is not an energy company. It is a military-industrial complex with a nuclear cover. And after the European Union’s 20th sanctions package, it is still the company Europe refuses to touch.
Rosatom—the state-owned corporation that runs the occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant—remains virtually untouched.
Twenty rounds of sanctions have hit Russian oil, Russian banks, Russian oligarchs, Russian propaganda outlets, and an expanding list of shadow-fleet tankers. Rosatom—the state-owned corporation that runs the occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and houses 21 weapons-production entities, from drone components to technologies for the “Oreshnik” ballistic missile—remains virtually untouched.
The gap is not accidental. Since February 2022, the EU has paid Rosatom more than €1.6 billion for uranium imports alone: €280 million in 2022, €686 million in 2023, and over €700 million in 2024, according to Bellona’s analysis of Eurostat data and the Bruegel–DiXi Group joint study.
The money keeps flowing. So does the dual-use technology moving in the other direction, including components used in X-series cruise missiles.
While Ukrainian forces exhaust Russia’s war machine at the cost of blood through strikes on oil refineries, logistics, and military infrastructure, Europe is financing the same machine through nuclear contracts.
Zaporizhzhia: weaponizing a reactor site
The occupation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the largest in Europe, has set a precedent that once seemed unthinkable. IAEA missions have documented military equipment and explosives inside the turbine halls.
Since the occupation began, the plant has experienced 14 power outages, each time switching to emergency diesel generators—the last line of safety. Of the more than 100 licensed reactor operators who worked there before the invasion, only 22 remain. The occupiers drove out the rest.
Russia systematically strikes the energy infrastructure that powers all four of Ukraine’s operating nuclear plants.
Zaporizhzhia is not the only target. Russia systematically strikes the energy infrastructure that powers all four of Ukraine’s operating nuclear plants—Rivne, Khmelnytskyi, South Ukraine, and Zaporizhzhia—forcing reactors into emergency shutdown.
On 14 February 2025, a Russian drone damaged the outer and inner shells of the New Safe Confinement at the Chornobyl site, along with its main crane system. The structure, a €1.5 billion engineering project, was designed to contain the radioactive remains of the destroyed fourth reactor. Even decommissioned nuclear facilities are now legitimate targets, in Russia’s reading.
Chornobyl’s lesson, ignored
Forty years ago this week, the Chornobyl disaster taught the world a lesson that should not need repeating: radiation has no borders. It does not stop at national boundaries. It does not distinguish between people and animals. It does not remain “local.” It destroys all living things—humans, animals, and ecosystems—with consequences that last for decades.
The world concluded that such tragedies must never happen again.
The 1986 catastrophe was not only technological. It was the product of a political system where safety was sacrificed to ideology and truth to secrecy. The Soviet Union paid with human lives and international disgrace, but not with legal accountability. The world concluded that such tragedies must never happen again.
Today, the Russian Federation—the Soviet Union’s legal successor—is using nuclear blackmail and the occupation of a nuclear power plant as a deliberate strategy. In 1986, a failing system could not cope with disaster. In 2026, a functioning regime is deliberately bringing one closer.
The economic dependence
The international response remains disproportionate to the threat, and the reason is economic. Rosatom is directly involved in the occupation of the Zaporizhzhia plant and in the coercive control of its remaining staff.
It also remains one of the most important foreign suppliers to the EU nuclear sector—supplying fuel, fuel assemblies, enrichment services, and engineering support to reactors across several member states.
Cooperation with Rosatom gives Russia access to Western technologies and hard currency.
That dependence is precisely what Moscow exploits. Nuclear infrastructure becomes a tool of blackmail. Opaque supply chains allow existing sanctions to be circumvented. Cooperation with Rosatom gives Russia access to Western technologies and hard currency—which the terrorist state spends on hybrid attacks against the same EU countries buying its uranium.
Treat the energy infrastructure around nuclear plants as a matter of nuclear safety, not merely humanitarian concern.
As Viktoriia Voytsitska argued in her analysis for the Heinrich Böll Foundation, protecting Ukraine’s nuclear plants is protecting nuclear safety across Europe. Her prescription is threefold: phase Rosatom out of European supply chains entirely; treat the energy infrastructure around nuclear plants as a matter of nuclear safety, not merely humanitarian concern; and support decentralized energy in Ukraine, which has proven resilient under attack where centralized systems have not.
Twenty packages in, one gap remains
Sanctioning Rosatom would do two things simultaneously. It would end the €700 million annual transfer from European ratepayers to the corporation holding Zaporizhzhia hostage. And it would cut the import channel through which Rosatom’s subsidiaries acquire the dual-use technology used in Russian missile programs—the same missiles now striking Ukrainian cities and Ukraine’s nuclear grid.
On 26 April 2026, forty years after Chornobyl, rallies in cities around the world will demand what the 20th sanctions package did not deliver: Save all living things. Stop the Russian nuclear war machine—sanction Rosatom.
Public pressure is one of the few forces capable of moving this decision.
Public pressure is one of the few forces capable of moving this decision. Joining a protest, amplifying the campaign online, or writing directly to Members of the European Parliament using prepared templates are all ways to signal that the loophole is being watched.
Nuclear risk in Europe is no longer theoretical. It is a plant wired with explosives, a drone through the confinement shell at Chornobyl, a corporation that builds ballistic missiles and sells uranium to the governments trying to stop the war it enables. Inaction is itself a choice. And the cost of that choice will not stop at Ukraine’s borders—no more than radiation ever did.
Sanctions against Rosatom—now.
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