France is having its uranium enriched in Russia again. The European goal of stopping energy imports from the sanctioned country is falling by the wayside.
November 21, 2025, 9:14 p.mNovember 21, 2025, 9:14 p.m
Stefan Brändle, Paris / ch media
It was a coincidence of timing: Emmanuel Macron was celebrating Ukraine’s order of 100 French fighter jets with Volodymyr Zelensky this week when Greenpeace published a communiqué that sounds less glorious for the French president. The environmental organization accuses him of nothing less than “hypocrisy”: Macron is showing determination against the Russian aggressor; At the same time, however, he is allowing new business with the Russian state-owned company Rosatom.
The freighter Mikhail Dudin in the French port of Dunkerque, here in a picture from 2022. picture: ap
The explosive accusation goes back to last Saturday. A local representative of Greenpeace France photographed the loading of the Russian freighter Mikhail Dudin with ten containers in the port of Dunkerque (Dunkirk). According to the warning labels, they contain atomic material.
The Mikhail Dudin sails under the Panamanian flag, but is owned by the Russian company Rosatom. He transported uranium from the French La Hague reprocessing plant to Petersburg until 2022; The nuclear fuel was then enriched in the “forbidden” Siberian site of Seversk.
Uranium is not oil or gas
The photos seem to show that Franco-Russian transport across the Baltic Sea is resuming. The French energy company Electricité de France (EDF) did not want to confirm the fact, but did not deny it either. There is no question that the presidential office in the Élysée approved the nuclear transport. This is embarrassing for Macron because the French president is on the front diplomatic front against the Putin regime; That’s why he is also committed to the Repower-EU project to ensure Europe’s independence from Russian oil and gas.
France is making itself dependent on him: Russian President Vladimir Putin.image: imago
Uranium is conspicuously excluded from this EU project. Too many nuclear power plant operators depend on Russian nuclear technology, such as Finland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia – and also France. His nuclear power plant of 56 reactors, the second largest in the world after the USA, was intended to ensure the nation’s energy independence for founding father Charles de Gaulle.
Under Putin, the Rosatom group he founded in 2007 has gradually made its expertise available to the French. France can have its uranium processed in La Hague enriched in Seversk – and only there – in order to then use it a second time in the French Cruas nuclear power plant (Ardèche).
According to Greenpeace France, 35,000 tons of processed uranium are currently waiting to be enriched by Tenex, a Rosatom subcontractor, in Pierrelatte (Rhone Valley). Jacky Bonnemains from the Paris-based environmental association Robin des bois estimates that France’s dependence on Russian technology will be even greater in the long term than before the war. EDF had previously announced that it wanted to feed more reactors with Russian-style enriched uranium this decade.
Prefer to remain silent: French President Emmanuel Macron.image: imago
Why France is resuming uranium shipments to Russia is not documented, as EDF and the Élysée remain silent on the matter. The surplus of reprocessed uranium in La Hague is probably just one reason. The current increase in uranium prices seems more important. They could further boost French households’ energy bills, which have already risen sharply – a political issue of the first order. Ahead of the upcoming local and presidential elections in France, Macron wants to avoid higher energy prices at all costs. At the risk of further increasing dependence on Russian energy supplies.
French nuclear power plant in Saint-Vulbas, a good hundred kilometers from the Swiss border. image: getty