Reeves’ £150 cut in UK’s energy bills will be nuked by Sizewell costs, ex-Labour donor claims
Dale Vince’s claims over the impact of paying for Sizewell C on energy bills is one of a number of hidden costs which could see consumers pay higher bills – instead of £150 less
David Maddox, Political Editor
Rachel Reeves’ pledge to take £150 off household energy bills could be wiped out because of the costs of nuclear energy, hidden green levies andnew levies being introduced by the energy regulator, it has been claimed.
In her Budget last week, the chancellor promised to take £150 off
household bills by scrapping the Energy Company Obligation (ECO) scheme.
But former Labour donor and green entrepreneur Dale Vince has now claimed that the impact of paying for building nuclear energy capacity will largely wipe out the £150 because of the £1bn cost in the first year and ongoing costs for nuclear power.
Independent 7th Dec 2025, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/reeves-energy-bill-discount-nuclear-power-budget-b2878907.html
Russia’s economy is not about to explode.
Yet western propagandists need you to believe that it will.
Ian Proud, Dec 06, 2025, https://thepeacemonger.substack.com/p/russias-economy-is-not-about-to-explode?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3221990&post_id=180801359&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email;
I’ve been hearing since 2014 about the imminent implosion of Russia’s economy, but this has never looked likely to happen.
In a remarkable recent article in the UK’s Telegraph newspaper, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard makes the remarkable claim that the ‘balance of advantage is shifting in favour of Ukraine,’ on the basis that Russia may soon go into economic meltdown. He goes on to say that if we walk away now, we will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.’
However, and conveniently, he does not elucidate how Ukraine is gaining the supposed upper-hand, nor how an implausible victory over Russia might be achieved. That is because there is no evidence to support his claims.
Evans-Pritchard’s CV doesn’t show any obvious subject matter expertise on Russia. But this should come as no surprise from a newspaper – the Telegraph – whose Ukraine watcher team is stuffed with Russophobes and ex-British military types who have a vested interested in maintaining the delusion of eventual Russian defeat.
Take Dom Nicholls, who co-hosts the telegraph’s Ukraine: the Latest podcast, which grandly describes itself as the ‘world’s most trusted and award winning podcast on the war,’ even though Nicholls’ CV suggests absolutely zero subject matter expertise on the issue of Russia. His podcast never departs from the UK government line that Putin must be defeated eventually, and that only more pressure will do the trick. Nor does he allow the podcast to drift too far into real evidence about the ability of Russia to fight on longer than Ukraine can fight on.
Then take Hamish De-Bretton Gordon, retired Colonel and Chemical weapons expert with even less expertise than Dom Nicholls, who, in any case, has no Russia expertise. He regularly posts fantastical articles with titles such as ‘Putin is eating his own supporters,’ and ‘Putin will be quaking in his boots today.’
It doesn’t matter that they have no understanding of the strategic balance of power in the Ukraine war. Facts and analysis are entirely redundant for people whose top, indeed, only priority is to peddle the latest lines from the Ministry of Defence on Whitehall. This is not journalism it is government propaganda. The BBC, which in any case is a state-owned broadcaster, is bad enough in its one-sided reporting, but the Telegraph is more sinister because of its infiltration by pseudo-government operatives covering as experts.
Characteristic of most western media commentary of the in Ukraine and, indeed, of the Ukraine crisis since it started, has been the complete lack of comparison.
Focus is always and only on the negative impacts of conflict on Russia itself. And, indeed, there have been negative consequences. Russia is subject to over 20,000 economic sanctions, locked out of most trade with the west, excluded from political dialogue as an article of diplomacy, cut off from most international sports and cultural events, hundreds of thousands of its troops killed or injured since the war started, its regular citizens increasingly restricted in their movements within Europe.
The economy of Russia today looks vastly different from that in 2014 when the crisis started. As President Putin recently pointed out, economic growth is sagging from its early war highs which were stimulated by a massive fiscal splurge. Interest rates and inflation remain worryingly high, labour shortages in some industries are growing, the population continues to age, and it remains over-reliant on fossil fuel exports.
Some of these issues are long-standing, while others have become more acute since the war began. Yet, these manifest limitations are never juxtaposed against the even greater challenges that Ukraine faces, which you will seldom hear mention of in the Telegraph.
The weight of western foreign policy, bolstered by willing pro-war reporters in the media, is that breaking Russia’s petroeconomic model will force Putin to back down, and that sanctions are helping to do just that.
So, let’s take a look at Ambrose-Pritchard’s key argument that Russia’s oil exports are collapsing on the back of Trump’s recent sanctioning of Rosneft and Lukoil. This might be persuasive if true and if Ukraine’s exports were somehow performing much better.
Yet, the early evidence suggests otherwise. US sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil do appear dramatically to have reduced their volumes of trade. However, there is also evidence, that trade has simply been diverted to other Russian exporters of oil, with no significant net effect. Diversion, which has been widely reported by the media, is and has been a Russian tactic to minimise sanctions impact for over a decade, after all.
Bear in mind that Russian oil has been sanctioned in one way or another by the EU since 2014, and that there has been a progressive shutting down of gas exports since the war in Ukraine started. You would therefore expect that the total value of Russia’s exports had fallen.
Except that it hasn’t.
Since 2014, the average quarterly value of Russian exports has been a fraction above $100 bn. This takes account of the huge surge in export values shortly before the war started and throughout 2022 on the back of soaring oil prices. In the four quarters from Q4 2021 to Q3 2022, Russian exports averaged $150 bn (or $50 bn per month), 50% higher than the long-term average. But on the flip side, it also averages out against troughs, in particular after the oil price collapse of 2016 and during COVID.
In the first two quarters of 2025, Russian exports have come in at $98 bn, $2bn below the long-term average, although, in fact, identical to the two-year period from Q4 2019 through Q3 2021. So, no golden bullet evidence here of sanctions having a more than marginal impact at best, given Russia’s export pivot towards Asia and the global south.
In any case, the value of exports is a less helpful reference than the overall trade balance, i.e. the difference between exports and imports. It doesn’t matter how big a country’s exports are if they are importing more.
Let’s take a historical look back to the start of the Ukraine crisis in 2014. Russia’s quarterly current account surplus – its balance of exports over imports – has averagfed $17.9 bn. Right now it is lower, at $11 bn with oil prices falling and imports higher than average. In 2022, Russia pulled in its highest ever current account surplus, with a quarterly average of $59.5 bn, when oil prices were soaring.
However, the key point is that Russia is able to stay in surplus every year and hasn’t experienced a full-year current account deficit since 1997, and even then it was less than $1 bn.
Consistently exporting more than it imports, Russia has built its international reserves over time, giving it resilience against external economic shocks and pressure. Russia’s international reserves have steadily grown from around $400 bn in late 2014, to $725 bn now. Even if western powers expropriated all of the approximately $300 bn in immobilised assets, Russia would still possess more than it had in 2014, the year the Ukraine crisis started.
In a quite bizarre comment, Evans-Pritchard says ‘Putin can keep selling Russia’s reserves of gold, all the way down to the Tsarist double eagles at the bottom of the vault beneath Neglinnaya Street,’ (the location of Russia’s Central Bank). This hints strongly, that Russia is on the verge of running out of gold, right?
And yet, Russia’s reserve stock of monetary gold has grown from $132 bn when the war started in 2022, to $299 bn today, which includes an increase of $17bn in October 2025.
I don’t say this out of any desire to prove Russia to be right, but rather from a determination to let our analysis of the situation to be driven by data, not vacuous sound bites.
The ridiculous announcements in the Daily Telegraph lack credibility precisely because they consciously and intentionally avoid hard evidence about Russia while avoiding all mention of Ukraine’s difficulties. Readers are invited to believe that Ukraine is doing just fine, and that if we just keep pumping money in, they will eventually win.
So, let’s look at Ukraine in comparison. Since 2014 through 2024, it has consistently imported more than it exports, with an average yearly trade deficit of $13.1 bn. During the first three full years of war, that rose on average to $25.6 bn, and in the first ten months of 2025, it is already at $39.8 bn. Expressed another way, Ukraine exported $24 bn less in 2024 than it did in 2021 and imported $2.5 bn more. War and European restrictions on the import of cheap Ukrainian agriculture have hit the value of its exports hard. That might bounce back when the war ends, even though Evans-Pritchard wants it to continue.
But, even so, Ukraine’s current account has shown an average deficit of $2.8 bn since 2014; the figure is so much lower than the trade balance because of big inflows of foreign donations, in particular in 2015 and in 2022, which led to a current account surplus in those years. Critically, while Ukraine had a current account surplus of $8bn in 2022, it slumped back into deficit in 2023, with a shortfall of $9.6 bn which rose to $15.1 bn in 2024. In the first 10 months of 2025, the deficit already stands at $26.9 bn.
That means Ukraine will need at least $30 bn in foreign exchange this year just to keep its currency afloat. The only credible way right now in which Ukraine can easily fill the hole in its international reserves is to receive donations from western nations. And as we are starting to see, in respect of Europe’s faltering efforts to agree a bizarrely named ‘reparations loan’, that is proving increasingly difficult because of Belgian and European Central Bank resistance.
So, War hungry pundits in the Telegraph talk about the imminent collapse of the Russian economy are only deflecting attention from the real problem. When the western money stops flooding into Ukraine, the country may quickly find itself having to devalue its currency and, in so doing, deal with spiralling inflation, high interest rates and a sovereign default.
Of course, Ukraine is already bankrupt, as it refuses to make payments on its existing debt while nonetheless asking for more loans. Western IFIs have conveniently turned a blind eye to this right back to 2015 when Ukraine defaulted on a loan it had received from Russia. They’ve done this under pressure from western governments who also, no doubt, drive outlandish Telegraph headlines about Russia’s imminent implosion.
The sad truth is, people like Evans-Pritchard need the war to continue so they have something to say. They certainly couldn’t care a jot about Ukraine itsel
Europe could be on the hook for $160 billion to keep Ukraine afloat.
Belgium is holding the line on using Russia’s frozen assets for now, which leaves Europe obligated to keep the lights on and the war going
Ian Proud, Dec 04, 2025, https://thepeacemonger.substack.com/p/europe-could-be-on-the-hook-for-160?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3221990&post_id=180637110&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Below my article of yesterday in Responsible Statecraft on the issue of the spuriously named ‘reparations loan’ to Ukraine. Since going to print, the European Central Bank has come out to torpedo the Commission’s expropriation of $140 bn in immobilised Russian assets to fund the Ukrainian war effort. This should come as no surprise, as Christine Lagarde pointed out the risks at the October European Council meeting, and Bart de Wever leaned heavily on her advice in his subsequent remarks to the media.
Not surprisingly, western mainstream pro-war hacks have come out a-howling at this outrage. The eternally moronic Anders Aslund questioning the ECB’s right to have an opinion on European financial assistance to Ukraine. Bill Browder simply suggesting Europe should expropriate the funds anyway, even though they are housed in Belgium, and the Belgians won’t permit it.You can see why he made so much money in Russia in the nineties. Less clear which clown in Whitehall decided he should be knighted.
The level of idiocy is truly off the charts. And the clamour now is so loud simply because Ukraine will shortly run out of money, Europe will need to tip more money into the bottomless pit at Bankova, and they may well have to use funds from national budgets (even if it is packaged up as common EU debt).
Meanwhile, Belgian police have raied the premises of hte former EU foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, arresting her on suspicion of fraud at the College of Europe. Who is surprised that yet another unelected, unaccountable EU apparatchik is on the make?
Perhaps that’s why the Commission is so desperate to support the corrupt regime in Kyiv, as they are kindred spirits. More likely, they are merely stupid and have no self-awareness. Ursula von der Leyen seems to be carrying on regardless, as if nothing is untowards. driving towards the cliff edge at breakneck speed with her and Kaja Kallas’ feet firmly on the accelerator pedal. You couldn’t make it up….
I hope you find the article interesting.
Even if war ended tomorrow, Europe could be on the hook for 135 billion euros (nearly $160 billion) over the next two years to keep Ukraine afloat. Brussels does not appear to have a plan B up its sleeve.
I first warned in September 2024 that using immobilized Russian assets to fund war fighting in Ukraine would disincentivize Russia from suing for peace. Nothing has changed since then. Russia maintains the battlefield advantage, has the financial reserves, extremely low levels of debt by Western standards, and can afford to keep fighting, despite the human cost. Putin is self-evidently waiting the Europeans out, knowing they will run out of money before he does.
For now, his strategy appears to be working, because Ukraine has no money and Europe — unwilling to see Ukraine pushed into an unfavorable peace — is groaning under the obligation to find an answer. In May I also reported that “Ukraine is already asking for more money to continue fighting into 2026, a sure sign that President Volodmyr Zelensky has no plans to end the war.”
At that time, the likely cost of war fighting for another year was estimated at around $43.3 billion. The bill has since gone up to $63 billion in 2026 and, according to the IMF, $136.6 billion over the next four years.
Europe simply does not have this level of funding freely available. As a result, European political leaders are descending into panic mode as the chicken of Ukraine’s enormous budget shortfall comes home to roost.
That chicken, to quote the prime minister of Belgium, Bart de Wever, in remarks after the October European council meeting, is the $140 billion in immobilized Russian assets that the European Commission would like to use to back a “reparations loan” to Ukraine. Self-evidently, this money isn’t intended for reparations, but rather to soak up Ukraine’s expected deficits going forward.
All of the money would be pumped into Ukraine’s treasury to meet day to day expenses, with the defense bill alone costing $172 million every day right now, compared to $140 million per day one year ago. And on the basis that Ukraine’s budget estimates only ever go up and not down, that money won’t last forever.
At this point, one might be tempted to think that Ukraine’s vast defense spending, which accounts for around 63% of the Ukrainian government’s budget, will fall away if the war ends this year, in response to President Trump’s peace initiative. But such an assumption is, I fear, misplaced. Europe has been pressuring the U.S. not to cap the size of Ukraine’s near one million strong army in any peace deal. In a best-case scenario, Ukraine might decide in a graduated way to reduce the size of its army over time. But that would still leave a large budget black hole for some years to come. Yet a large army won’t pay for itself and the Europeans will be left to pay the bill.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Belgians are saying “non” to the use of immobilized assets in its country to fund Ukraine’s fiscal deficit. Prime Minister de Wever claims that doing so will derail U.S.-led efforts to bring the near four-year long war to a close, by disincentivizing Russia from settling, which takes us back to the point I made 15 months ago.
However, the deeper issue for Belgium is a fear that sanctioning the expropriation of Russian sovereign assets on shaky legal ground would shred its financial reputation and scare off investors from the developing world. Belgium-based Euroclear, where the immobilized Russian assets are held, has a stock of $4 trillion in sovereign assets from around the globe. Starting to eat the chicken of these assets, as Belgium’s prime minister puts it, by essentially lending those assets to Ukraine, could “damage Belgium’s reputation as a reliable financial hub and erode trust in the euro and the EU financial system.”
Predictably, that has led to a storm of protest from other European states that are piling increasing pressure on Belgium to relent and so free up the monies for Ukraine’s cause. But as de Wever has pointed out on numerous occasions, those European states, for example, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, are not offering to unleash immobilized Russian assets in their jurisdictions and so share the financial risk. Nor are they willing to back the loan of assets held in Belgium with guarantees to repay a proportion of the cost, should Russia mount a successful legal challenge after the war ends. So, for now, Belgium is holding out and blocking the loan, with few signs that it will back down.
As a result, the matter has been kicked back to December for a final decision buying time for the Eurocrats in Brussels to sway their recalcitrant Belgian hosts. If agreement cannot be reached, Ukraine faces the prospect of running out of money to fight, on the basis that it is locked out of access to Western capital markets, given its moratorium on the repayment of debt.
That leaves the European Commission in the position of possibly having to raise capital on the markets to make a non-repayable grant to Ukraine to cover its financing needs in 2026.
How did we end up here? Since 2024, Western sponsors of the war in Ukraine have progressively shifted from offering free cash to loans, most notably the last big G7 loan of $50 billion that was agreed in June of 2024. But with Ukraine’s national debt to GDP having risen from 49% in 2021 to 109% now, piling more debt on the war-ravaged country may literally equate to killing Ukraine with kindness.
The reparations loan was clearly intended as a means to make Russia pay so that neither Ukraine, nor Europe, had to. Efforts to find off-budget means to pay for the war in Ukraine have always been “an unseemly quest for alternatives to western taxpayers funding.” Put simply, cash-strapped European governments can’t easily afford to give Ukraine their own money at a time when their governments face rising political headwinds at home from nationalist parties.
Mainstream European political leaders have remained implacably set against the idea of bringing the senseless war in Ukraine to a much-needed close. They will pay the price for this at the polls in the coming years, as the big fiscal chicken of war spending pecks away at their legitimacy at home. This is all the more depressing for having been so utterly predictable.
Russia Dangles Business Ties To U.S. at Europe’s Expense. Kremlin pitched White House on investments and industry to end war – today’s Wall Street Journal
American and Russian business leaders were quietly anticipating that Witkoff and Dmitriev would deliver, positioning their companies to profit from peace.
2 Dec 2025 By Drew Hinshaw, Benoit Faucon , Rebecca Ballhaus , Thomas Grove and Joe Parkinson
Three powerful businessmen— two Americans and a Russian—hunched over a laptop in Miami Beach, ostensibly to draw up a plan to end Russia’s long and deadly war with Ukraine.
But the full scope of their project went much further, according to people familiar with the talks. They were privately charting a path to bring Russia’s $2 trillion economy in from the cold—with American businesses first in line to beat European competitors to the dividends.
At his waterfront estate, billionaire developer-turned-special envoy Steve Witkoff was hosting Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund and Vladimir Putin’s handpicked negotiator, who had largely shaped the document they were revising on the screen. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, had arrived from his nearby home on an island known as the “Billionaire Bunker.”
Dmitriev was pushing a plan for U.S. companies to tap the roughly $300 billion of Russian central bank assets, frozen in Europe, for U.S.-Russian investment projects and a U.S.-led reconstruction of Ukraine. U.S. and Russian companies could join to exploit the vast mineral wealth in the Arctic. There were no limits to what two longtime adversaries could achieve, Dmitriev had argued: Their rival space industries, which raced one another during the Cold War, could even pursue a joint mission to Mars with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
For the Kremlin, the Miami talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity, according to Western security officials. By dangling multibillion-dollar rareearth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.
Dmitriev, a Goldman Sachs alumnus, had found receptive partners in Witkoff—Trump’s longtime golfing partner—and Kushner, whose investment fund, Affinity Partners, drew billion-dollar investments from the Arab monarchies whose conflict with Israel he had helped mediate.
The two businessmen shared President Trump’s longheld approach to geopolitics. If generations of diplomats viewed the post-Soviet challenges of Eastern Europe as a Gordian knot to be painstakingly unraveled, the president envisioned an easy fix: The borders matter less than the business. In the 1980s, he had offered to personally negotiate a swift end to the Cold War while building what he told Soviet diplomats would be a Trump Tower across the street from the Kremlin, with their Communist regime as a business partner.
“Russia has so many vast resources, vast expanses of land,” Witkoff told The Wall Street Journal, describing at length his hopes that Russia, Ukraine and America would all become business partners. “If we do all that, and everybody’s prospering and they’re all a part of it, and there’s upside for everybody, that’s going to naturally be a bulwark against future conflicts there. Because everybody’s thriving.”
Red lines
When a version of the 28point plan leaked earlier this month, it drew immediate protests. Leaders in Europe and Ukraine complained it reflected mostly Russian talking points and bulldozed through nearly all of Kyiv’s red lines. They weren’t assuaged even after administration officials assured them that the plan wasn’t set in stone, worried that Russia— after violently redrawing European borders—was being rewarded with commercial opportunities.
As Western leaders convened to digest the plan, Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk offered a pithy summary: “We know this is not about peace. It’s about business.”
For many in the Trump White House, that blurring of business and geopolitics is a feature, not a bug. Key presidential advisers see an opportunity for American investors to snap up lucrative deals in a new postwar Russia and become the commercial guarantors of peace. In conversations with Witkoff and Kushner, Russia has been clear it would prefer U.S. businesses to step in, not rivals from European states whose leaders have “talked a lot of trash” about the peace efforts, one of these people said: “It’s Trump’s ‘Art of the Deal’ to say, ‘Look, I’m settling this thing and there’s huge economic benefits for doing that for America, right?’” A question for history will be whether Putin entertained this approach in the interest of ending the war, or as a ploy to pacify the U.S. while prolonging a conflict he believes is his place in history to slowly, ineluctably win.
Trusted friends
One sign that he may be serious is that some of his mosttrusted friends, sanctioned billionaires from his St. Petersburg hometown—Gennady Timchenko, Yuri Kovalchuk and the Rotenberg brothers, Boris and Arkady—have sent representatives to quietly meet American companies to explore rare-earth mining and energy deals, according to people familiar with the meetings and European security officials. That includes reviving the giant Nord Stream pipeline, sabotaged by Ukrainian tactical divers, and under European Union sanctions.
Earlier this year, Exxon Mobil met with Russia’s biggest state energy company, Rosneft, to discuss returning to the massive Sakhalin gas project if Moscow and Washington gave the green light.
Elsewhere, a cast of businessmen close to the Trump administration have been looking to position themselves as new economic links between the U.S. and Russia.
Gentry Beach, a college friend of Donald Trump Jr. and campaign donor to his father, has been in talks to acquire a stake in a Russian Arctic gas project if it is released from sanctions. Another Trump donor, Stephen P. Lynch, paid $600,000 this year to a lobbyist close to Trump Jr. who is helping him seek a Treasury Department license to buy the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from a Russian state-owned company.
There is no evidence that Witkoff, the White House or Kushner are briefed on these efforts or coordinating them. A person familiar with Witkoff’s thinking said the envoy is confident that any settlement with Russia would benefit America broadly, not just a handful of investors.
Witkoff, who hasn’t traveled to Ukraine this year, is set to visit Russia for the sixth time this week and will again meet Putin. He insisted he isn’t playing favorites. “Ukrainians have fought heroically for their independence,” said Witkoff, who has tried to inspire Ukrainian officials with the idea of soldiers disarming to earn Silicon Valley-scale salaries operating American built AI data centers. “It is now time to consolidate what they have achieved through diplomacy,” he said.
‘Both sides’
“The Trump administration has gathered input from both the Ukrainians and Russians to formulate a peace deal that can stop the killing and bring this war to a close,” said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly. “As the President said, his national security team has made great progress over the past week, and the agreement will continue to be fine-tuned following conversations with officials from both sides.”
As Witkoff pursued talks with Dmitriev over nine months, some agencies inside the Trump administration had a limited view of his dealings with Moscow.
In the lead-up to an August summit in Alaska between Trump and Putin, Witkoff and Dmitriev discussed a prisoner exchange that would have been the largest bilateral swap in their countries’ history. The Central Intelligence Agency, which traditionally manages prisoner trades with Russia, wasn’t fully briefed on that proposed exchange. Nor was the State Department’s office for unjustly imprisoned Americans. The CIA didn’t return requests for comment. The State Department referred questions to the White House.
Career officials overseeing sanctions at the Treasury Department have at times learned details of Witkoff’s meetings with Moscow from their British counterparts.
In the days after Alaska, a European intelligence agency distributed a hard-copy report in a manila envelope to some of the continent’s most senior national security officials, who were shocked by the contents: Inside were details of the commercial and economic plans the Trump administration had been pursuing with Russia, including jointly mining rare earths in the Arctic.
Witkoff has worked closely with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But the special envoy for Ukraine, former Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, has all but been frozen out of serious talks, and said he is leaving.
To understand the administration’s Russia negotiations, The Wall Street Journal spoke to dozens of officials, diplomats, and former and current intelligence officers from the U.S., Russia and Europe, and American lobbyists and investors close to the administration.
The picture that emerges is a remarkable story of business leaders working outside the traditional lines of diplomacy to cement a peace agreement with business deals.
‘ We keep on knocking at the door and coming up with ideas.’
Witkoff was just weeks into his new job as President Trump’s Russia and Ukraine negotiator when his office asked the Treasury Department for help allowing a sanctioned Russian businessman to visit Washington.
Kirill Dmitriev, an investment banker with degrees from Harvard and Stanford, spoke Witkoff’s preferred language: business. He had invited Witkoff to Moscow in February and escorted him into a three-hour meeting with Putin to discuss the Ukraine war. But Dmitriev was persona non grata in the U.S, blocked by the Treasury in 2022 for his role leading his country’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, which it called a “slush fund for Vladimir Putin.”
Trump had told Witkoff he wanted the war to end and the administration was willing to take the risk of welcoming Putin’s emissary to Washington. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had questions about the unique request, but ultimately signed off.
Dmitriev arrived at the White House on April 2 and presented a list of multibilliondollar business projects the two governments could pursue together. At one point, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Dmitriev that Putin needed to demonstrate he was serious about peace. But Dmitriev felt his businesslike rapport was breaking through. “We can transition i n v e s t m e n t trust into a political role,” he said in an unpublished interview that month.
In April, Dmitriev welcomed Witkoff to the St. Petersburg presidential library for another three-hour meeting with Putin. Witkoff took his own notes, relying on a Kremlin translator, then briefed the White House from the U.S. Embassy. That same month, European national security advisers planned to meet Witkoff in London to integrate him into their peace process. But he was busy with his other portfolio— negotiating a cease-fire in Gaza—and couldn’t make it. Afterward, one European official asked Witkoff to start speaking with allies over the secure fixed line Europe’s heads of state use to conduct sensitive diplomatic conversations. Witkoff demurred, as he traveled too much to use the cumbersome system.
Dmitriev and Witkoff meanwhile were chatting regularly by phone about increasingly ambitious proposals. The U.S. and Russia were discussing major agreements on oil-andgas exploration and Arctic transportation, Dmitriev told the Journal. “We believe that the U.S. and Russia can cooperate basically on everything in the Arctic,” he said. “If a solution is found in Ukraine, U.S. economic cooperation can be a foundation for our relationship going forward.”
Into position
American and Russian business leaders were quietly anticipating that Witkoff and Dmitriev would deliver, positioning their companies to profit from peace.
Exxon, billionaire investor Todd Boehly and others have explored buying assets owned by Lukoil, Russia’s second-largest oil producer. The U.S. sanctioned Lukoil in October to increase pressure on Moscow, prompting the company to put its overseas assets up for sale. Elliott Investment Management eyed buying a stake in a pipeline that carries Russian natural gas into Europe.
More recently, Kremlin–linked businessmen Timchenko, Kovalchuk and the Rotenbergs have been offering U.S. counterparts gas concessions in the Sea of Okhotsk, as well as potentially four other locations, according to a European security official and a person familiar with the talks. Russia has also mentioned rare-earth mining opportunities near the massive nickel mines of Norilsk and in as many as six other Siberian locations that are still unexploited, these people said.
Beach, Trump Jr.’s college friend, was in talks to acquire 9.9% of an Arctic LNG project with Novatek, Russia’s secondlargest natural gas producer— which is partly owned by Timchenko — if the U.S. and U.K. remove sanctions on it, according to drafts of contracts reviewed by the Journal.
In a statement, Beach said that partnering with Novatek would “strongly benefit any company committed to advancing American energy leadership,” and that his company, America First Global, “actively seeks investment opportunities that strengthen American interests around the world.” He said he “has never worked with Steve Witkoff” but is “extremely grateful” for the efforts Witkoff and others are making to end the war in Ukraine. Trump Jr. has told people he isn’t doing business with Beach.Lynch, the Miami-based investor, had been asking the U.S. government to allow him to bid on the sabotaged Nord Stream Pipeline 2 if it came up for auction in a Swiss bankruptcy proceeding. Lynch, who in 2022 was given a license by Treasury to complete the acquisition of the Swiss subsidiary of Russia’s Sberbank, had been seeking a license for the pipeline since the Biden administration, but in April dialed up his lobbying efforts by hiring Ches McDowell, a friend of Trump Jr. He would pay Mc-Dowell’s firm $600,000 over the next six months. Lynch’s representatives reached out to Witkoff for a meeting.
The road to Miami
On Aug. 6, Witkoff flew to Moscow, at Putin’s invitation, for a meeting prepared only a few days in advance. Dmitriev walked him through Zaryadye Park overlooking the Moskva River, then escorted him to the Kremlin for another three-hour session with Russia’s leader. Putin mentioned wanting to meet with Trump personally. He gave Witkoff a medal, the Order of Lenin, to pass to a CIA deputy director whose mentally unwell son was killed fighting for Russia in Ukraine.
The next day, Witkoff dialed into a videoconference with officials and heads of state from top European allies, and explained the outlines of what he understood to be Putin’s offer. If Ukraine would surrender the remaining roughly 20% of Donetsk province that Russia had failed to conquer, Moscow would forfeit its claim to Zaporizhzhia and Kherson provinces. The European officials were confused. Did Putin mean he would withdraw his troops from Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, as Witkoff was suggesting? Or, more likely, was Putin merely promising to not conquer the thousands of square miles of those two provinces that, after years of bloody fighting, remained in Ukrainian hands? Either way, Ukraine was skeptical about the value of a promise from Putin.
Witkoff wanted to strike while the iron was hot and hold a summit without delay. Dmitriev was optimistic Witkoff had taken Russia’s sensitivities on board: “We believe Steve Witkoff and the Trump team are doing a great job to understand the Russian position to end the conflict,” he told the Journal, a few days before.
Failed summit
The Aug. 15 summit fell apart almost as soon as it began. Witkoff, Rubio, and Trump arrived on Air Force One, meeting Putin, his longtime adviser Yuri Ushakov, and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Putin launched into a 1,000-year history lecture on the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian people. The two sides canceled a lunch and an afternoon session where they were meant to check through their other issues, like the exchange of prisoners. Witkoff left uncertain where things stood, but hopeful talks would accelerate soon.
In October, President Zelensky flew to Washington, hoping to secure long-range, U.S.made Tomahawk cruise missiles. His military wanted to cripple Russian refineries, pushing Moscow to negotiate on better terms. By the time Zelensky arrived, Trump had spoken to Putin and decided not to offer the Tomahawks. Witkoff encouraged Ukrainian officials to try another tack: They should ask Trump for a 10-year tariff exemption. It would supercharge their economy, he said. “I’m in the deal settlement business. That’s why I’m here,” he told the Journal. “We keep on knocking at the door and coming up with ideas.”
Did Davey’s EDF Hinkley deal scupper tax payer?
Is EDF about to pocket extra cash due to strike price from decade ago?
The Telegraph reports that Hinkley Point C will slap £1bn a year onto UK
energy bills the moment it starts generating. The cash will flow straight
from households to EDF under a subsidy deal locked in more than a decade
ago.
A second £1bn hit will land through the nuclear levy that bankrolls
Sizewell C in Suffolk. Campaigners are already calling the combination a
“nuclear tax on households” as ministers push ahead with the biggest
expansion of nuclear power in a generation.
Treasury and OBR documents
released after Rachel Reeves’s Budget spell out how the money will move.
CfD receipts are forecast to hit £4.6bn in 2030-31 with £1bn of that
handed to Hinkley C in its first year of operation. The root cause is the
2013 strike price agreed between EDF and Sir Ed Davey. It guarantees
£92.50/MWh for Hinkley’s output, now worth £133 with inflation and
expected to reach around £150 by the time the plant opens in 2030. If
wholesale prices hover near £80/MWh as they do today EDF can claim roughly£70/MWh from consumers and businesses to make up the difference.
Energy Live News 1st Dec 2025. https://www.energylivenews.com/2025/12/01/did-daveys-edf-hinkley-deal-scupper-tax-payer/
Former Heads of CIA, MI5, Mossad and CSIS Profit From Israel’s Genocide
Dimitri Lascaris, Dec 02, 2025, https://reason2resist.substack.com/p/former-heads-of-cia-mi5-mossad-and?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2811845&post_id=180423423&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Awz Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Toronto, is a who’s who of Western intelligence chiefs. Few people have heard of Awz before, but its partners and strategic advisors include former senior directors of the CIA, FBI, MI5, CSIS, Mossad, Shin Bet, and Israel’s Unit 8200.
The President of Awz’s Advisory Committee is Stephen Harper, arguably the most pro-Israel Prime Minister in Canada’s history.
Awz has made major investments in Israeli cyber-security firms that have exploited and profited from Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.
In November 2025, Reason2Resist correspondent Rami Yahia visited the Milipol Homeland Security Conference in Paris, France. Posing as a buyer of cybersecurity products, Rami gathered intel on Israeli firms that have close ties to Awz.
In Reason2Resist’s latest livestream, Rami and I discuss the closely guarded secrets that his investigation uncovered. Our report includes previously unpublished video and audio recordings of Rami’s conversations at the Milipol Exhibition with representatives of Israeli cyber-security firms.
UK Nuclear Projects Set to Add $1.3 Billion a Year to Power Bills
By Tsvetana Paraskova – Nov 28, 2025,
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/UK-Nuclear-Projects-Set-to-Add-13-Billion-a-Year-to-Power-Bills.html
Subsidies and Contracts for Difference (CfD) that the UK government has promised to the two projects for new nuclear power stations are expected to add $1.32 billion (£1 billion) annually to the UK power bills from around 2030, The Telegraph reports, citing documents by the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).
The Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, developed by EDF, is expected to begin generating electricity in 2030-31, after years of delays and cost overruns.
That year, CfD is expected to generate $6.1 billion (£4.6 billion) in receipts, including £1.0 billion to fund subsidy payments to the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant for its first year of expected generation, OBR said in its economic and fiscal outlook released after the UK’s latest budget announcement.
The UK government earlier this year also took the final investment decision to build the $51-billion Sizewell C nuclear power plant on the Suffolk Coast in eastern England, which was the first British-owned nuclear power station to be announced in over three decades.
Sizewell C will be the first nuclear power station in the UK financed using a regulated asset base (RAB) model that levies an additional charge on consumer energy bills, which contributes to the financing costs of the plant, OBR noted. This levy is also expected to increase energy bills as early as January.
UK households will pay slightly higher energy bills in the first quarter of 2026 after energy market regulator Ofgem last week raised the Energy Price Cap by 0.2%, against expectations of a 1% drop.
The slight increase in the price cap is driven by government policy costs and operating costs. This includes funding the government’s Sizewell C nuclear project, which will bring more [?] clean power, Ofgem noted.
Opponents of new conventional nuclear plants in Britain argue that consumers will be burdened with a “nuclear tax” for the expensive projects in their energy bills.
“The Government has a misguided belief that nuclear will be a cheap, ‘green’ solution to our energy needs, but the evidence shows the opposite – that costs of delivery and of dealing with nuclear waste – will continue to rise,” Alison Downes, of Stop Sizewell C, told The Telegraph.
“We remain opposed to the imposition of a nuclear tax on households, given the acknowledged uncertainty about the projected costs of constructing Sizewell C.”
UK energy bill payers will hand £2bn a year to EDF for new power stations
COMMENT. Here is a prime example of the crookedness of the UK Labour government, in pretending that the nuclear industry is beneficial to people and the environment:
“The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has promised to cut energy bills by an average £150 for each household from April by slashing green levies.“
UK green levies are taxes imposed by the government on sources of pollution, which contribute to about 8% of a household’s energy bill. These levies raise funds for various energy-efficiency schemes and have generated £5.9 billion from household energy bills in 2024. They are essential for supporting energy-saving measures in homes and for expanding renewable energy sources, ultimately improving energy security in the UK
French government-owned company to receive funding for Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C
Rob Davies, Guardian 28th Nov 2025
UK energy bill payers will hand over £2bn a year in subsidies to EDF, the French company building two nuclear power stations, according to government figures.
EDF, owned by the French government, will be entitled to £1bn in annual payments as soon as Hinkley Point C, in Somerset, comes on to the grid in 2030. The sum is due under the contracts-for-difference system that guarantees low-carbon energy companies a fixed price for the electricity they generate..
Separately, £1bn will be added to bills through a separate nuclear levy scheme to fund Sizewell C, in Suffolk, a 3.2 gigawatt (GW) project also led by EDF.
The result is an increase of about £2bn in bills, funding the cost of two plants that together will generate about a sixth of the electricity that Britain was using during peak demand so far this year, equivalent to 6m homes.
A government spokesperson said: “We are reversing a legacy of no new nuclear power being delivered to unlock a golden age of nuclear, securing thousands of good, skilled jobs and billions in investment.”
The government hopes the extra cost of new nuclear reactors could be offset in the future by the stable “baseload” output they offer, which can rein in the rising cost of balancing volatile output from energy sources such as solar and wind.
That balancing cost is expected to hit about £2bn this year, according to the Nuclear Industry Association. The government said Sizewell alone could save £2bn a year in future, adding that the impact on bills over the construction period was likely to be about £1 a household each month.
The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has promised to cut energy bills by an average £150 for each household from April by slashing green levies.
Assessments of the nuclear subsidy were revealed in documents released by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which assesses the impact of economic policy. The OBR said EDF would receive £1bn in the first year of operation at Hinkley, due to come on stream in 2030 after 12 years of construction.
“In 2030-31, contracts for difference (CfDs) are expected to generate £4.6bn in government receipts, including £1bn to fund subsidy payments to the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant for its first year of expected generation,” the OBR said.
The subsidy is the result of an agreement struck between EDF and the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2013.
The then energy secretary, Ed Davey, now the leader of the Liberal Democrats, agreed a “strike price” guaranteeing that the French state-owned company would receive £92.50 for each megawatt hour (MWh) for electricity generated at the 3.2 GW plant.
The strike price has risen with inflation to about £133 and is projected to reach £150 in 2030, according to the Daily Telegraph, which first reported the Hinkley subsidy.
The wholesale cost of electricity is much lower, now about £80 a MWh, meaning EDF will be able to claim the shortfall from consumers and businesses that use its electricity, thanks to the CfD agreement…….
The construction of Sizewell C, which has yet to begin and is scheduled for completion in the 2030s, will also drive up bills.
From January, energy bills will be inflated by a levy supporting the plant’s construction, adding £10 a year. The levy is expected to raise £700m but will double to 2030 to fund Sizewell, whose price tag is projected to hit £100bn.
In practice, the cost of the power station could increase. Hinkley Point C was originally projected to cost £18bn but has been subject to several time and cost overruns; EDF predicted last year the final bill could hit £46bn. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/28/uk-energy-bill-payers-edf-hinkley-point-c-sizewell-c
Hinkley Point C nuclear power station will add £1bn a year to energy bills.
Electricity project will be UK’s most expensive source with consumers footing the cost.
Jonathan Leake, Energy Editor, 28 Nov 25
The troubled Hinkley Point C nuclear power station will add £1bn annually to UK energy bills as soon as it’s switched on, official figures show.
The money will be taken from consumers and handed to the French owner EDF to subsidise operations, making it one of the UK’s most expensive sources of electricity.
A further £1bn will be added to bills by a separate
nuclear levy, supporting construction of the Sizewell C nuclear power
station in Suffolk, also led by EDF. Campaigners branded it a “nuclear
tax on households”.
Details were revealed in documents released by the
Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility in the wake of Rachel
Reeves’s Budget. They describe how EDF will be entitled to claim the
money under the “Contracts for Difference” subsidy system as soon as
Hinkley C begins operations, probably in 2030.
The documents state: “In
2030-31, Contracts for Difference (CfDs) are expected to generate £4.6bn
in government receipts, including £1bn to fund subsidy payments to the
Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant for its first year of expected
generation.” The impact on bills is linked to a 2013 agreement reached
between EDF and Sir Ed Davey, the then energy secretary.
He guaranteed that
EDF could charge £92.50 per megawatt hour (MWh) of power once Hinkley
Point C came online. With inflation, this equates to £133 today and is
expected to reach about £150 in 2030. If the wholesale cost of electricity
remains at its current level of about £80/MWh, then EDF can claim an extra
£70 from consumers and businesses via CfDs.
From January, energy bills
will also be hit by an entirely separate levy designed to support the
construction of another nuclear power station at Sizewell in Suffolk. The
Regulated Asset Base levy will add £10 a year to power bills from 2026,
raising £700m, but will roughly double by 2030, when it will need to raise
£1.4bn a year for Sizewell.
Telegraph 28th Nov 2025, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/11/28/hinkley-point-c-nuclear-power-station-add-1bn-a-year-bills/
UK ‘most expensive’ in the world for nuclear projects due to complex regulation, taskforce finds.
“However, it is absolutely critical that we do not pursue cost reduction at the expense of health and safety standards”
The UK has become the “most expensive” nation in the world to
construct new nuclear projects and an overhaul to planning is needed to
remedy this, according to a new report published by the Nuclear Regulatory
Taskforce.
Examples of the delays and cost overruns are apparent in the
UK’s current nuclear construction projects, Hinkley Point C and Sizewell
C. Namely, the construction of Hinkley Point C has faced several issues
including health and safety concerns, structural faults, as well as
significant cost overruns and delays.
Financially, the project’s
estimated costs have risen to between £31bn and £34bn, up from an initial
£25bn to £26bn in 2015 prices. These cost increases are attributed to
civil engineering price hikes and delays in the electromechanical phase.
Consequently, the operational date for Unit 1 has been pushed back, with
scenarios suggesting completion between 2029 and 2031, partly due to
slower-than-anticipated civil construction, inflation, labour, and material
shortages, as well as disruptions from Covid-19 and Brexit.
The government’s Office for Value for Money (OVfM) noted that these cost
overruns and delays at Hinkley Point C complicated the development of the
Sizewell C project. While the huge costs involved with nuclear projects in
the UK are apparent, law firm Browne Jacobson has argued that, with time
and efficiencies being realised in their construction, costs will start to
go down. Browne Jacobson partner Zoe Stollard said: “Whilst the current
costs of nuclear power station construction in the UK may appear
substantial, it’s important to recognise that these figures will likely
decrease as efficiencies are realised in future projects.
“However, it is absolutely critical that we do not pursue cost reduction at the expense of health and safety standards. Maintaining the highest levels of nuclear safety, security, and safety culture are imperative. “Investing wisely in these projects now is essential to reduce the potential for significant
incidents further down the line. The upfront investment in robust safety
measures and regulatory compliance is not merely a cost, it is a necessary
safeguard for public welfare and long-term operational success.”
New Civil Engineer 25th Nov 2025
Nuclear’s Costly Comeback Meets Harsh Market Reality.
By Leon Stille – Nov 21, 2025, https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Nuclears-Costly-Comeback-Meets-Harsh-Market-Reality.html
- Nuclear power’s “cheap, clean, and secure” promise is breaking down.
- Small modular reactors (SMRs) remain largely theoretical, with the only advanced U.S. project cancelled over high costs.
- Renewables and storage now dominate energy economics, offering faster build times, flexibility, and lower prices.
I’ve followed the promise of small modular reactors (SMRs) and next-generation nuclear in several of my earlier pieces on OilPrice. The argument is familiar: nuclear provides low-carbon baseload, ensures energy security, and will one day deliver affordable, clean power. It sounds persuasive, until you look at the numbers. New nuclear remains slow, expensive, and deeply reliant on state support. In today’s European power markets, where renewables are already driving prices to record lows or even negative territory, the idea that nuclear can deliver “cheap and secure” power no longer holds up.
Expensive power disguised as security
Let’s start with the UK. Hinkley Point C, the flagship of the country’s nuclear revival, was only made possible through a 35-year Contract for Difference guaranteeing a strike price of £92.50 per MWh (in 2012 money). That’s roughly double the current wholesale market price, indexed to inflation, and fully guaranteed by taxpayers. It isn’t market competitiveness, it’s a subsidy designed to get the project financed.
Sizewell C will take the same path under a Regulated Asset Base model, transferring part of the construction risk directly to consumers through levies on electricity bills long before a single watt is produced. When “cheap” energy requires that level of public underwriting, something is fundamentally off.
A track record written in red ink
This pattern isn’t unique to Britain. France’s Flamanville reactor, long touted as the EPR showpiece, is over a decade late and has quadrupled in cost to more than €13 billion. Finland’s Olkiluoto 3 only began commercial operations after 17 years of delays and legal disputes. In the United States, Vogtle 3 and 4 finally came online after 15 years and around $36 billion in total costs, double initial projections, with ratepayers footing much of the bill through regulated recovery.
The nuclear industry’s narrative of reliability is at odds with its delivery record. Projects start with optimism and end with budget blowouts, political fallout, and consumer bailouts.
The SMR Illusion
Advocates often pivot to SMRs as the saviour, the “Tesla moment” for nuclear. I explored that hype in an earlier OilPrice article, noting that SMRs were being promoted as modular, factory-built, and inherently cheaper. Yet so far, reality looks familiar.
The most advanced U.S. SMR project, NuScale’s Carbon Free Power Project in Idaho, was cancelled in 2023 after projected costs rose to $89 per MWh, far above renewables and storage. Other designs remain on paper, heavily dependent on public subsidies or guaranteed offtake. The promise of small reactors may eventually prove out, but at the moment, SMRs are an idea with a press office, not a business case.
The market reality has shifted
Europe’s electricity markets tell the other half of the story. In 2024, countries like Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands each recorded more than 450 hours of negative day-ahead prices. France saw nearly 360. Across the EU, negative or ultra-low price hours exceeded 9,000 in total.
For inflexible, capital-intensive baseload assets like nuclear, that’s disastrous. These plants can’t ramp down profitably when prices collapse. Their economics depend on constant, high utilization, and that world is disappearing. The more renewables come online, the more volatile the price pattern becomes, with long stretches of near-zero wholesale power. Nuclear simply doesn’t fit this market geometry.
Renewables and storage are doing what nuclear can’t
The contrast is striking. Renewables can be deployed modularly, financed privately, and built within 18–36 months. Utility-scale batteries, once dismissed as expensive, are now scaling at record speed. Europe installed nearly 22 GWh of new storage capacity in 2024, bringing total installed capacity above 60 GWh. Italy’s first grid-scale auction secured 10 GWh of storage at competitive prices, no decade-long delays, no multi-billion-euro risk exposure.
Each incremental gigawatt of storage turns volatile wind and solar into a more stable, dispatchable asset. In that environment, nuclear’s supposed advantage of “firm capacity” starts to look less like a virtue and more like an anchor.
Security means flexibility, not monoliths
Nuclear advocates still frame the argument in security terms, stable, domestic generation insulated from fossil-fuel geopolitics. But in modern energy systems, security no longer means “always-on baseload.” It means adaptability, diversification, and resilience.
A network built from distributed solar, wind, storage, and demand-side flexibility is inherently harder to disrupt. It can absorb shocks, balance local fluctuations, and restart quickly after failures. A multi-billion-euro single-site nuclear facility, by contrast, is a high-value target for cost escalation, technical failure, or even physical risk.
Energy security in the 2020s is about systems thinking, not megaproject symbolism.
The economics of opportunity cost
Every euro sunk into new nuclear is a euro not available for faster, cheaper solutions. A 10 billion-euro reactor might take 15 years to produce its first electrons. The same money could build tens of gigawatts of solar and wind, backed by large-scale storage, grid upgrades, and hydrogen electrolysers to absorb surplus power, all online before the nuclear project breaks ground.
The opportunity cost is immense. Renewable portfolios are now financeable at market rates; nuclear requires a bespoke government rescue package before it even begins.
A niche role, not a blueprint
To be clear, existing reactors that can be safely life-extended make sense. Extending France’s fleet, or upgrading proven units, delivers low-carbon energy at marginal cost. But that’s asset management, not a case for new construction.
Building a fresh wave of reactors on 20-year timelines, in a power market already defined by negative pricing and flexible storage, is a strategic mismatch. Nuclear can remain a niche contributor, but not the foundation of affordable or adaptable decarbonization.
Conclusion: The future has moved on
The myth of nuclear as “secure, clean, and cheap” collapses under scrutiny. It is clean once built, but rarely cheap, and often far from secure when you consider financing and policy risk. Meanwhile, renewables plus storage are delivering real, scalable, market-driven results right now.
We no longer live in a world where the problem is lack of technology. The challenge is choosing the right ones for the energy system we are actually building, a fast, flexible, decentralized grid where adaptability equals security.
Labour’s nuclear tax to blame for rising energy bills, says Octopus.
THE UK Government’s nuclear levy is to blame for rising energy bills,
according to a leading utilities company. Octopus Energy has said that
Labour’s imposition of a tax on energy bills to pay for the construction of
the Sizewell C nuclear power plant in Suffolk is forcing up household costs.
Rachel Fletcher, the company’s director for regulation, said: “The price
cap is rising again, driven by costly subsidies for mega projects like
Sizewell C and major network upgrades that are adding billions to consumer bills – with no end in sight.
“Let’s be clear: this isn’t about supplier
profits, which are capped at around 2%, or renewables. The real issue is
our inefficient electricity system burdened by ever-growing policy and
network costs that keep stacking up on household bills.
“Instead of
paying wind farms not to generate and locking the country into tens of
billions of unnecessary grid spending, we need bold market reform. This
would save billpayers at least £5 billion a year and finally unlock the
full potential of our homegrown green energy.”
Speaking to Westminster’s
Energy Committee earlier this month, Fletcher estimated that contrary to
Labour’s pledge to cut energy bills by £300 a year, they were actually
going up by that amount to fund improvements to the grid and transmission networks.
The National 21st Nov 2025,
https://www.thenational.scot/news/25641939.labours-nuclear-tax-blame-rising-energy-bills-says-octopus/
How Holtec International became an expanding (and controversial) nuclear power.
In Ukraine, Holtec’s principal state partner, Energoatom, has become the focus of a sweeping corruption inquiry
Holtec now controls the fate of multiple nuclear power plants across the United States………. even though Holtec had never operated a nuclear power plant.
One week after acquiring Palisades for decommissioning, Holtec submitted plans to the Energy Department for restarting the plant. Those plans only came to public light through a Freedom of Information Act request by the activist group Beyond Nuclear, published on its website in October 2023. In March 2024, Holtec secured a $1.52 billion US government loan guarantee and moved forward with an attempt to restart the nuclear reactor, despite expert assessments that the plant was no longer viable.
Following its start as a producer of nuclear waste storage canisters, Holtec International has built an empire around mothballed nuclear power plants and as-yet incomplete nuclear initiatives. The firm’s history of overpromising and underdelivery raises a question: Is this who we should trust with the future of nuclear energy?
Bulletin, By Matt Smith, November 20, 2025
On a 90-degree afternoon in July 2014, the governor, the mayor, and the local state senator gathered before 200 people at Camden, New Jersey’s Broadway Terminal along the Delaware River to celebrate an impending economic miracle. A planned technology center would bring pioneering nuclear technology and hundreds of new jobs to a dismal waterfront known for its unemployment and poverty.
State Sen. Donald Norcross, among those on a stage decorated with an eight-foot-tall banner bearing the red and black logo of Holtec International, said the company behind the deal was “a titan of energy.”
Holtec CEO Krishna Singh could locate his company’s nuclear technology center anywhere, not just in the United States but in the world, Norcross said, “And he chose Camden.”
The 47-acre campus would be used to develop a new kind of nuclear reactor that “cannot under any condition go out of control,” Singh said.
Now, the promised local miracle of economic progress seems, at most, incremental. There is no nuclear power plant assembly line as initially envisioned by Singh. His promised next-generation nuclear reactors remain conceptual a decade later, so far not progressing beyond the drawing board.
Singh made public pronouncements about providing a “path out of hereditary poverty” and a “pathway to the middle class” for Camden residents. The Camden facility would employ some 2,000 laborers and 1,000 professional staff in its first five years, the company said in promotional materials. But it ultimately hired far fewer locals than initially suggested.
In a statement in response to questions for this article, Holtec said that it has exceeded every obligation outlined in its contractual agreement with the state related to its Camden site. Also, the company noted that a court had rejected the state of New Jersey’s view that Holtec had fallen short of commitments, restoring funds that had been withheld based on claims of noncompliance.
New Jersey officials did, however, abandon a partnership with Holtec to build a job training center. Holtec said the state’s move “turned its back on the people of one of America’s poorest cities. The company has continued to invest in workforce development initiatives and to create meaningful opportunities for residents, advancing its mission to contribute to the city’s long-term economic revitalization.”
Documents filed in state and federal courts, records from regulatory agencies, and interviews with officials, activists, ex-employees, and industry analysts show that the Camden project was not a Holtec anomaly. Across its ventures, announcements of grand undertakings have been followed by under-delivery and controversy, as Holtec, a company primarily known for making concrete nuclear waste containers, succeeded in promoting itself as a high-tech leader in nuclear power generation and the decommissioning of nuclear power plants.
Since launching the Krishna P. Singh Technology Campus in Camden, Holtec has expanded aggressively into the decommissioning of shuttered nuclear power plants and a government-backed attempt to revive the largely dormant US nuclear energy sector. Holtec’s business strategy has relied in part on acquiring old nuclear plants and tapping into trust funds that plant operators had paid to the government for the eventual decommissioning of those plants. In some cases, Holtec has then reversed course and tried to restart aging reactors. Internationally, Holtec has positioned itself as spearheading US efforts to expand nuclear power generation in Ukraine and South Korea.
The stakes of that claim are higher now. In Ukraine, Holtec’s principal state partner, Energoatom, has become the focus of a sweeping corruption inquiry alleging years of inflated contracts, illicit payments and political interference in the very projects Holtec helped build at Chernobyl — prompting new scrutiny of the environment in which those projects took shape.
Although many of its projects are either unfinished or less than initially portrayed, Holtec now controls the fate of multiple nuclear power plants across the United States. The company that didn’t fully deliver on initial promises about a technology center in Camden (see sidebar) has been entrusted with billions of dollars from ratepayer-funded decommissioning trust funds, responsibility for some of the nation’s most hazardous nuclear sites, and permission to re-start a closed nuclear reactor—even though Holtec had never operated a nuclear power plant.
Now, Holtec plans to go public in a planned stock offering that Singh told Barron’s could value his company at $10 billion. Singh hopes to sell shares worth 20 percent of the company’s total value in a stock offering that aims to raise capital for an expansion of its oft-stated plans to build small modular reactors (SMRs), a next-generation technology that, for Holtec, remains in the design stage and has not yet been licensed.
The move to go public entrusts yet more financial and public faith in a company whose grand undertakings have often been followed by controversy and under-delivery.
Capitalizing on the failure of Yucca Mountain
………………………………………………………………………………….. Today, Singh oversees a company that has expanded far beyond building nuclear fuel storage casks. Holtec has won contracts to control nuclear plants and manage billions of dollars in federally mandated decommissioning trust funds. However, this aggressive expansion has been overshadowed by serious concerns: 24-year-old bribery allegations (see sidebar) and regulatory violations related to employee radiation exposure risk, quality control in spent fuel transportation and storage systems, and inadequate security. Activists, public officials, and nuclear experts question whether a company with no prior experience in building, operating, or maintaining nuclear power plants—one that has attracted sustained controversy—should be positioned to lead a significant part of America’s nuclear future
………………………………………………………………………….In 2018, Holtec formed a subsidiary called Holtec Decommissioning International and began acquiring shuttered nuclear plants outright. Rather than simply selling storage systems to utilities, Holtec would now buy entire reactor sites, take control of their decommissioning trust funds, and assume responsibility for dismantling the facilities and managing the radioactive waste stored there.
Each closed nuclear plant came with a substantial decommissioning trust fund—money collected from ratepayers over decades to pay for eventual cleanup.
Holtec claimed it could complete the decommissioning work much faster than utilities had planned, promising 10- to 12-year timelines instead of the 60 years allowed by regulators. Also, there was a glittering prospect: Holtec could potentially keep whatever remained in the trust funds after decommissioning was complete………………………………….
For former Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) chairman Gregory Jaczko and other observers skeptical of Holtec’s plans, one important question centers on whether Holtec has been set up in a way that will allow it to be held accountable should things go wrong.
Singh has set up his business via a web of subsidiaries spanning 17 countries across four continents. The company has created dozens of separate entities, from Holtec Orrvilon in Hong Kong to operations in Britain and Ukraine, plus numerous limited liability companies (LLCs) clustered in New Jersey, Delaware, and Florida. These are set up in complex structures, whereby entities often own each other in nested arrangements, with one LLC either a shareholder or a subsidiary of the other.
This structure is perhaps most clearly seen in Holtec’s nuclear decommissioning business. Each closed plant—the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan, the Indian Point plant in New York, and the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts—exists within its own special-purpose LLC. These subsidiaries control billions of dollars in decommissioning trust funds while maintaining limited legal liability, according to state attorneys general from Massachusetts and New York.
………………………………………Jaczko noted that there was no corporate entity positioned to provide a financial backstop if something went wrong.
………………………….“This structure is far less transparent and accountable than what we typically see for power plant ownership,” he said. “It appears that there is no corporate entity with sufficient resources to provide capital and cover operating expenses in the event of revenue losses, whether due to accidents or plant problems requiring extended shutdowns.”………………………………………………………….
A tangled tale: Holtec in Ukraine
…………………………………….. Anti-corruption officials in Ukraine in early November announced a $100 million corruption scandal that forced out the senior leadership of Energoatom, the principal state partner with Holtec at Chernobyl. The officials describe corruption and a lack of oversight at the agency—during periods that overlapped Holtec’s work. As of press time, allegations had not included Holtec itself.
……………………………Holtec’s promotional materials continue to present its Ukraine record as evidence of competence and reliability. Ukrainian authorities, meanwhile, continue collecting evidence to support allegations that agencies overseeing the U.S. company were compromised.
Publicly available information does not indicate that Holtec has been formally accused of wrongdoing in the Ukrainian corruption cases.
…………………….According to Holtec’s and the Ukrainian government’s project documents, the company served as the prime contractor for what is known as the Interim Spent Nuclear Fuel Dry Storage Facility, or ISF-2, which is designed to hold spent fuel from undamaged reactors at Chernobyl, which had remained in operation until 2000. Holtec hired YUTEM-Engineering as its principal subcontractor. That is, Holtec had a direct, if unwitting, role in hiring and managing a key local company whose owner had financial ties to what official Ukrainian investigations said was a notorious corruption network.
Holtec’s Ukrainian venture began in the mid-2000s, when the country confronted a growing crisis over its nuclear waste. Each year, Ukraine paid Russia approximately $200 million to dispose of the spent fuel from its 15 reactors. American officials grew increasingly worried about this dependency, diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show. In leaked cables, those officials touted Holtec as a means to pry Ukraine from Russia’s nuclear embrace. The geopolitical urgency also had a practical side: Holtec might help secure waste in the still-hazardous Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
Ukraine decided to make the depopulated land around the old plant into a general-purpose nuclear waste storage site serving both the old plant and its spent fuel, as well as spent fuel from power plants elsewhere in the country.
The most visually prominent of the three separate projects is a massive arch-shaped sarcophagus that contains the old, damaged portion of the Chernobyl complex. But there are two lesser-known facilities, and that’s where Holtec supplied management, technical know-how, and equipment. Holtec was the main contractor for what was called the Interim Storage Facility-2 for spent fuel from Chernobyl reactors. And it supplied equipment and engineering support for the Centralized Spent Fuel Storage Facility, built to store nuclear waste from elsewhere.
In its prime contractor role, Holtec was to hire, manage, and pay subcontractors doing on-the-ground civil engineering work, according to records from the Chernobyl management agency, Ukraine’s public spending audit agency (hyperlined document in Ukrainian), and other documents.
Holtec’s work was supported by international heavyweights: the International Atomic Energy Agency and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The company nonetheless found itself in the company of controversial figures.
Holtec’s main local partner for the ISF-2 project was the firm YUTEM-Engineering, whose owner had ties to Maksym Mykytas, the head of a construction empire. According to official records, Holtec hired, managed, and paid YUTEM on that project.
Anti-corruption agencies have accused Mykytas of masterminding multimillion-dollar collusion and bribery schemes related to, among other things, the repository for waste from outside Chernobyl. On that centralized fuel storage project, Holtec was not responsible for hiring or managing YUTEM, which became mired in bid-rigging and bribery scandals.
Evidence connects YUTEM to a wider alleged criminal enterprise that’s been the subject of multiple high-profile investigations of alleged embezzlement, fraud, bribery, and bid-rigging. The Bulletin traced these ties via multiple records, including Mykyta’s asset declaration from 2017, when he was a member of Ukraine’s parliament, showing he received money or equity worth approximately $75,000 in a transaction with YUTEM’s owner.
Mykytas was not just any politician. According to Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, he was the alleged mastermind of a sprawling network of companies used to embezzle state funds.
……………………………..Eventually, investigations into Mykytas caused progress on the nationwide storage facility to stall, though all the sites at Chernobyl eventually passed testing and licensing phases. By then, Holtec and Ukrainian officials were announcing another ambitious nuclear effort: a commitment to build 20 small modular reactors across the war-torn country. The announcement came despite Holtec having no US-approved reactor design and no experience building or running nuclear plants, and despite Russia’s ongoing campaign of bombing energy infrastructure, once again pitting a grand vision against a complex and hazardous reality.
……………………………….In December, Energoatom, Ukraine’s state-owned nuclear company, announced it was discussing with Holtec the idea of building a factory for SMR components to make Ukraine a regional center for the production and export of nuclear technologies.
In January, Energoatom announced its officials had held a video conference with Singh to discuss ideas such as a new factory for producing parts for SMRs, a joint Energoatom-Holtec engineering and training center, and “implementation of SMR-300 technology in Ukraine,” according to an agency announcement.……………………………
Holtec’s unusual strategy in Michigan. And elsewhere.
…………………………………….. unlike some competitors who have made at least incremental progress toward deployment, Holtec’s SMR vision has remained mostly notional. It wasn’t until July, when Holtec obtained an operating license for Palisades, that the company had ever obtained regulatory approval to operate a reactor.
Holtec, in a statement, said its announced plans to install SMR reactors in Michigan five years from now show that it is ahead of its competitors.
At its Camden facility, Holtec has announced plans to install a simulator to mimic the reactor conditions of its SMR. The company describes the facility as an innovation center for SMR design, employing over 600 highly skilled workers and says it will be “where the US’s first SMRs will be constructed and shipped for commercial deployment in this decade.” But no reactor manufacturing has begun as the company awaits regulatory approvals for its designs.
Even so, these paper reactors have yielded concrete returns.
In September 2024, the US Department of Energy granted Holtec a $1.52 billion loan guarantee to restart the mothballed Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan. The re-commissioning of Palisades is controversial in its own right, but Holtec has also woven its still-unproven SMR program into the Palisades narrative. Though the loan formally supports the restart of an existing unit at the plant, Holtec has presented the site as a dual project: a place to both reboot old infrastructure and a site for new SMRs, making Palisades “ground zero for America’s nuclear renaissance,” according to company marketing materials.
This renaissance story seems to be absent from federal records, however. The SMR-300 design does not yet have an NRC license application on file. Holtec suspended the SMR-160’s licensing process in 2023 and has begun only informal pre-application discussions for the new design, according to the NRC. The target date for filing formal applications from scratch is sometime in 2026, according to a Holtec presentation to the NRC.
The idea of SMRs continues to deliver. Singh now describes Palisades as the birthplace of a nuclear revival, promising to deploy Holtec’s SMR-300 design on the Michigan lakeshore by 2030……………
……………………………Although it lacks US certification for its SMR designs, Singh has pursued this SMR strategy internationally. In India, it envisions hundreds of reactors.
………………………………………How decommissioning became re-commissioning
Holtec bought the Palisades nuclear plant in 2018, gaining access to a $592 million fund set aside for decommissioning.
But Holtec’s stewardship of the Palisades plant soon took a swift course change. …………………………….
One week after acquiring Palisades for decommissioning, Holtec submitted plans to the Energy Department for restarting the plant. Those plans only came to public light through a Freedom of Information Act request by the activist group Beyond Nuclear, published on its website in October 2023. In March 2024, Holtec secured a $1.52 billion US government loan guarantee and moved forward with an attempt to restart the nuclear reactor, despite expert assessments that the plant was no longer viable.
…………………………………………….“They lied about what they were going to do at Palisades. They said they were taking over ownership to decommission the plant. Little did we know, they weren’t even intending to decommission,” said Kevin Kamps with Beyond Nuclear, an anti-nuclear advocacy group. “This was a trick to get their hands on the plant.”
………………………………………………………………………………………………………….The questions about Indian Point
……………………………………………………………………………………Community fears intensified in 2021 when Holtec announced plans to discharge radioactive wastewater from Indian Point into the Hudson River. State lawmakers swiftly passed legislation blocking such discharges. Holtec sued the state in April 2024, arguing the law unlawfully infringed on federal authority over nuclear safety. A federal judge ruled in favor of Holtec in September 2025, but New York is appealing the decision.
…………………………Holtec’s financial disclosures raise additional concerns. In meetings with state officials, company executives admitted that project delays or unexpected costs could undermine their business model…………………………………………………………….
Vision vs. reality
The story of Holtec often comes down to moments when soaring vision collides with terrestrial problems……………………………………..
……………………………………Holtec International capitalized on the federal government’s failure to create a national nuclear waste repository, creating a captive market for concrete casks now on-site at power plants across America. From this foundation, CEO Krishna Singh launched a more audacious expansion into decommissioning, acquiring shuttered nuclear plants outright. The company took control of billions in ratepayer-funded decommissioning trust funds, promising to clean up sites in a fraction of the time planned by utilities, with the glittering prospect of keeping any leftover money.
This aggressive growth, however, relies on financial and operational strategies that have drawn unflattering scrutiny. . Holtec structures its decommissioning projects through a web of special-purpose corporations (LLCs), which own the plants and control their trust funds, potentially leaving no backstop if a project encounters costly problems. Instead of legal guarantees, Singh has offered his word and his company’s reputation.
Now, Holtec is asking the public and investors for even greater faith as it plans a multibillion-dollar initial public stock offering. The capital raised is intended to fund another expansive promise. Yet, like the future of high-tech jobs once promised for Camden, these SMRs remain in the concept stage. The company has built an empire on mothballed plants and sidelined projects while selling a vision of a nuclear renaissance. Its history leaves a question for regulators and potential investors: Is this who the world should trust with a large portion of the future of nuclear energy?
Matt Smith is a freelance reporter with 30 years of experience covering business, the environment, and other topics. https://thebulletin.org/2025/11/how-holtec-international-became-an-expanding-and-controversial-nuclear-power/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Disasters%20in%20a%20post-truth%20world&utm_campaign=20251117%20Monday%20Newsletter%20%28Copy%29
Trump’s Westinghouse nuclear deal comes with unresolved questions
Unpacking the unusual details of the administration’s $80 billion deal with the nuclear giant.
Alexander C. Kaufman, LATITUDE MEDIA, November 20, 2025
Last month, the Trump administration announced a deal to spend at least $80 billion to build at least 10 new large-scale Westinghouse reactors, a move that seemed to anoint a “national champion” in nuclear power. On its face, the agreement appeared to offer these new U.S. AP1000s — the type of reactor built at Southern Company’s Plant Vogtle in Georgia — with a guarantee of financing akin to direct funding from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office.
But exactly how the $80 billion will be spent and when remains an open question.
The details are unusual. Rather than coming from the Energy Department, the Department of Commerce brokered the deal in what one Republican source described as an example of the administration’s internal “chaos.” Rather than coming from the federal budget, the $80 billion appears to be contingent upon Japan fulfilling its $550 billion investment in the U.S. that President Donald Trump negotiated in Tokyo last month. Rather than funneling the money through an entity such as the LPO, the disbursement process remains unclear.
“Without a sense of how this $80 billion is going to be used for nuclear in the U.S., it’s not going to give actual developers or owner-operators a chance to structure their own finances in response,” Advait Arun, a former Treasury Department analyst who now researches capital markets and energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise think tank, told Latitude Media. “Is $80 billion going to go through LPO? Will it go through the White House? Are there other costs? There [are] all these different ways to imagine how the $80 billion will flow.”
Adding to the uncertainty, a top Energy Department official said this week the federal government may take ownership of the new reactors outright.
“The role of having the government involved in private markets is sacrosanct; you just don’t do it,” Carl Coe, the Energy Department’s chief of staff, said at a conference hosted by the Tennessee Advanced Energy Business Council. “But this is a national emergency.”
In a statement, Cameco, the Canadian uranium giant that owns a 49% stake in Westinghouse, said the initial agreement with the Trump administration set the stage to “negotiate and enter into definitive” contracts. Brookfield Asset Management, the private equity firm that owns the 51% share of the nuclear giant, told Latitude Media it expected to broker a binding contract by early next year. ……………………………………………………………………….
The big investor-owned utilities — Exelon, Duke, or Southern Company, for example — are arguably the ones with the resources to pursue a new nuclear deal. But so far, they have resisted building the plants themselves.
“I wouldn’t build a nuclear plant,” Calvin Butler, CEO of utility giant Exelon, told CNBC last week. “What I could do is lean in on combined-cycle gas turbines. What I could do is build community solar. What I could do is own battery storage.”
In an earnings call earlier this month, Duke CEO Harry Sideris said North Carolina’s biggest utility would need to sort out some insurance policy to manage cost overruns before embarking on its loose plans to build more than a gigawatt of new nuclear power by 2037.
“We still need to figure out what we’re going to do with cost overrun protection and how we’re going to protect our investors and our customers from overruns,” Sideris told investors on the call. “Nothing going forward until we have those other items resolved.”
Westinghouse is pursuing alternative ways to bring down the cost of new reactors. Earlier this week, the company debuted new artificial intelligence software it’s developing with Google to streamline construction and reduce the enormous cost of interest payments on loans from slow buildouts.
‘A shiny toy’
That the landmark Westinghouse agreement came through the Commerce Department rather than the Energy Department is a sign of the lack of coordination between agencies under the Trump administration, a Republican source with direct knowledge of the White House’s nuclear plans told Latitude Media.
“Everyone is running around the globe trying to make deals to bring a shiny toy back to the president,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The source said it was a situation of “the left hand not knowing what the right is doing,” and expressed doubt that the Japanese would direct that much funding toward a non-Japanese company in the U.S.
But that might be about to change. In late October, hard-right stalwart Sanae Takaichi took office as prime minister, pushing her plans to rebuild her country’s nuclear sector. More than half of Japan’s operable reactors are still offline as part of a nationwide shutdown that occurred after the 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi accident, but the new Takaichi administration is aiming to restart those reactors and build new ones………………. https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/trumps-westinghouse-nuclear-deal-comes-with-unresolved-questions/
Nordic nations’ Ukraine burden ‘unsustainable’ – Sweden.
Stockholm has criticized uneven cash injections from other bloc members, despite claims about backing Kiev “for as long as it takes”
RT Thu, 20 Nov 2025, https://www.sott.net/article/503063-Nordic-nations-Ukraine-burden-unsustainable-Sweden
It is unsustainable for Nordic countries to continue to pay a disproportionate amount to support Ukraine, Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard has said in an interview with Politico. Rifts are widening inside the EU over how – and whether – to keep funding Kiev, according to the outlet.
Currently, Nordic and Baltic countries continue to contribute the most to Kiev relative to GDP, while larger EU economies trail far behind in proportional terms – a disparity Stockholm says the EU can no longer ignore.
In an interview published on Thursday, Stenergard claimed “a few countries take almost all of the burden,” calling the imbalance “not fair” and “not sustainable in the long run.”
She noted that the Nordic countries, with fewer than 30 million people, are expected to provide a third of NATO’s military aid to Ukraine this year. “It’s not reasonable in any way. And it says a lot about what the Nordics do – but it says even more about what the others don’t do.”
Comment: The Swedish foreign minister forgets that the Nordic countries are doing it out of their own blindness to reality. If they feel it is unfair, then just stop handing over the Nordic taxpayers money to Ukraine.
Stenergard’s comments reflect mounting frustration in northern capitals despite continued rhetoric about backing Ukraine “for as long as it takes,” Politico reported.
Comment: They thought that “as long as it takes” wouldn’t last so long. In other words, it was just a nice sounding slogan without much thought to what it actually meant.
EU officials have reportedly circulated a document outlining three options for the bloc’s next package for Kiev – two involving increased cash injections from member states, and a third using proceeds from frozen Russian sovereign assets. Stenergard signaled that using the immobilized assets could be the only viable path, given resistance in parts of the bloc to deeper budget commitments.
Western nations froze about $300 billion in Russian central bank assets after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022. The EU has so far transferred over a billion from interest to Kiev.
The debate comes as Ukraine faces a $100 million corruption scandal uncovered this month, in which anti-corruption agencies accused Timur Mindich – a former business partner of Vladimir Zelensky – of siphoning kickbacks from contracts with nuclear operator Energoatom, a company heavily dependent on foreign aid
The scandal broke just as Kiev is pushing for a new €140 billion ($160 billion) loan backed by frozen Russian assets, a plan stalled for weeks amid legal worries and Belgian resistance, with Moscow dismissing any use of its assets as “theft.”
Comment: So the Swedes want to steal Russian assets because they couldn’t really afford to support the black hole of Ukraine forever. They are now realizing that the money they gave to Ukraine will never come back and there wont be Russian resources to plunder. If they steal Russian frozen assets in Belgium, then the Euro will be relegated to the history of failed fiat currencies.
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