Vladimir Putin personally chauffeuring Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a tiny electric vehicle at his mansion demonstrates the extent of the leaders’ growing amity.
The fact that Russia was launching missiles at a children’s hospital in Ukraine during Modi’s contentious visit to Moscow suggests that the West’s efforts to isolate Putin over his war are failing. However, choosing to drive an electric vehicle has additional implications in oil-rich Russia: the Modi-Putin friendship, which was bolstered by European and American sanctions against Russian gas and oil, has now become more environmentally friendly.Modi, who leads the world’s biggest democracy, has propped Putin up by making India one of a few loyal customers of Russian oil and gas throughout the two-year war in Ukraine. On Tuesday during Modi’s visit, Russian state news agency TASS reported that the countries were in talks for Russia to build six new high-powered nuclear reactors in India, as well as next-generation small nuclear power plants.
For all the controversies over nuclear power, it’s a zero-carbon form of energy when generated and it’s fast becoming part of many countries’ answer to the climate crisis. A global race to supply nuclear plants and fuel to other parts of the world is on, and Russia is winning by many counts. “Commercially speaking, Russia isn’t good at making many things, but it does have natural resources, and it does have a strong nuclear tradition dating back to Soviet times, and that’s something it can take advantage of now,” Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative, told CNN. “Clearly the Kremlin has decided that would be a good idea, and some countries are keen to expand their own nuclear power production. And as with oil exports, India is one of those countries.”
That dominance in nuclear power is helping Putin retain his position on the world stage, even as the US and Europe shun him over the war. And Modi is clearly sticking with India’s tradition of a non-aligned foreign policy that allows it to trade with Russia while remaining a friend of the West.Russia lost the race in renewable tech to China and is lagging far behind the United States in its own energy transition, having developed very little wind and solar capacity. So, it’s betting big on selling nuclear abroad for income and influence, offering everything from conventional nuclear reactors, next-generation small modular reactors and an enriched uranium fuel known as HALEU, which no other country makes at any meaningful level as yet.
The United States is aware of how big a problem this is. The Biden administration, which is trying to compete with Russia to sell nuclear tech abroad, initially resisted targeting uranium in its Russian sanctions as the US was so reliant on it for its own nuclear power production. It changed its tune in May, when it banned Russian uranium imports, and is on a quest to rapidly develop its own industry to produce HALEU to fuel its own next-generation reactors. “Russia leads the world in the number of nuclear plant construction projects in other countries and the Russian government has been very aggressive in engaging international partners on civil nuclear cooperation,” said Alan Ahn, deputy director for the Nuclear, Climate and Energy Program with Third Way, a Washington DC-based climate and energy research organization.
“It is challenging for other countries to simply break away from the market position that Russia has built over decades,” he said, adding that to reduce Russia’s global influence through nuclear power, the US needs to “develop commercially competitive products.” A cruise around in an electric vehicle and a deal to boost nuclear power as clean energy, however, aren’t signs that Russia or India plan to give up on fossil fuels any time soon, or that either are climate leaders.
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