Ukrainian Prime Minister Shmyhal calls for sanctions over Russia’s ‘nuclear blackmail’

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The international community should respond to Vladimir Putin’s use of “nuclear blackmail” by imposing sanctions on Russia’s nuclear industry, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said Thursday, on the eve of the anniversary of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Mr. Shmyhal said Rosatom, the state-controlled nuclear energy company, should be added to the list of entities under Western sanctions after Mr. Putin threatened to restart the nuclear weapons race, a situation that is compounded by Russia’s illegal occupation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southern Ukraine.

Rosatom has stayed off Western sanctions lists so far in large part because many commercial nuclear reactors in Europe and the United States rely on uranium from Russia.

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On Tuesday, Mr. Putin declared that Russia was suspending its participation in a key nuclear arms control treaty that governs the number of warheads the United States and Russia can possess. The New START treaty also provided for regular inspections of the two nuclear arsenals.

The Russian President said Thursday that Russia would build up its nuclear deterrent by deploying a long-delayed intercontinental ballistic missile, rolling out hypersonic missiles and adding new nuclear submarines. “As before, we will pay increased attention to strengthening the nuclear triad,” he said in an address broadcast on state television to mark Russia’s “Defenders of the Fatherland” public holiday, which was called “Red Army Day” in Soviet times. The nuclear triad is a reference to weapons that can be fired from land, sea and air.

“Russia is turning to nuclear blackmail, so we need to give a very potent signal to the rest of the world that this nuclear blackmail should stop. And we should do our utmost to cut off the financial component of this,” Mr. Shmyhal said Thursday in an interview inside the sandbagged Cabinet of Ministers building in central Kyiv. Earlier in the day, air-raid sirens screamed over the capital, and a single explosion was heard.

Russia has occupied the Zaporizhzhia station – Europe’s largest nuclear facility – since March, and Ukraine’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said last week that the International Atomic Energy Agency had recently been prevented from rotating its monitors at the plant, which is managed by Rosatom. The IAEA has repeatedly warned of a potential disaster at the site, as shells have repeatedly fallen on and around the grounds of the facility.

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Mr. Shmyhal said both Rosatom and its executives should be hit with sanctions in order to pressure the company to leave the site and to deny the Kremlin a crucial source of income. Rosatom has been accused of directly supplying the Russian military with technology and equipment.

“I would say that the first step is personal sanctions against the Rosatom leadership and directors so that perhaps they will see it as encouragement making them willing to leave the Zaporizhzhia nuclear facility. The second step would be the sanctions against Rosatom and the nuclear sector,” Mr. Shmyhal told a small group of foreign journalists. “The total scope of the contracts they have with various international agencies comes to €200 billion. Again, this is huge revenue to their budget that funds the war against Ukraine.”

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Hungary, which relies on Rosatom uranium for 50 per cent of its power supply, has been particularly vocal in its opposition to sanctions against Russia’s nuclear industry. France has also publicly balked at targeting Rosatom.

The U.S. imports 14 per cent of its uranium from Russia, with some of that delivered by the CISN Shipping Group, a Montreal-registered company that received a waiver from Ottawa last year exempting it from Canadian sanctions – which prohibit any person or business from providing services in Russia – so CISN could continue to transport Russian uranium from St. Petersburg to clients in the U.S. The exemption expires Aug. 1.

Canada is the world’s second-largest producer of uranium, after Russia, and Canadian producers such as Saskatchewan giant Cameco Corp. would likely stand to benefit from Western sanctions on Rosatom.

Ihor Michalchyshyn, the head of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, a lobby group, called on the Canadian government to add Rosatom to its sanctions list. He said he was unaware of Ottawa’s position on the issue since “Canada’s sanctions regime is a black box to which neither we nor opposition MPs have any information on how decisions are made.” The UCC has asked Ottawa to impose a full trade embargo against Moscow and for Russia to be designated a “terrorist state.”

In an e-mailed statement to The Globe, Adrien Blanchard, press secretary for Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly, said that Canada calls on Russian forces to stop targeting and threatening nuclear sources, and it will continue to work with its allies and partners to pressure Russia to end its war.

While President Volodymyr Zelensky has been the public face of Ukraine’s resistance, and General Valery Zaluzhny the architect of its war strategy, Mr. Shmyhal has quietly kept the country’s government running.

Key to that, he acknowledged, has been a steady flow of Western financial assistance that has prevented the Ukrainian economy from collapsing. He said Ukraine’s gross domestic product had contracted by 30 per cent over the past year, resulting in a budget deficit of US$38-billion as military spending has simultaneously risen.

But he said he was confident that Ukraine’s partners, including Canada – which has provided almost $2-billion in financial support over the past year, in addition to military assistance – would continue to stand by it.

“I can honestly tell you that the plan of Putin was to seize Kyiv in 72 hours and to complete this special military operation within several weeks,” he said. “But here we are with you. It’s the 365th day of our resistance, and we still stand strong. We are still united and we are still fighting.”

Ukraine has increased security measures around the country ahead of Friday’s anniversary – including holding drills to rehearse the defence of Kyiv and other cities – after Mr. Zelensky warned earlier this month that Russia was planning to do “something symbolic” on or around the date.