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BREAKING: While the world watches Hormuz, Russia just locked in Asia’s nuclear future.
During Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh’s four-day visit to Moscow, Russia and Vietnam officially signed agreements for Rosatom to build Vietnam’s first nuclear power plant. Ninh Thuan 1. VVER-1200 reactors. This builds on the January 2025 energy MoU and a 2030 nuclear technology roadmap. Vietnam had suspended its nuclear programme in 2016. Eight years later, with oil above $100, the Strait of Hormuz closed, and the IEA calling this the worst energy crisis since the 1970s, the suspension is over.
Now hold two Rosatom stories in your mind simultaneously. In Iran, Rosatom is evacuating the Bushehr nuclear plant to a skeleton crew because the war has placed the facility within range of the next escalation phase. In Vietnam, Rosatom is signing contracts to build a new nuclear plant because the same war has proven that any country dependent on Middle Eastern hydrocarbons is one strait closure away from an energy crisis.
Rosatom is simultaneously abandoning one nuclear plant and selling another. The abandonment is the proof. The sale is the product. Bushehr demonstrates the risk of depending on a single energy corridor. Ninh Thuan is the hedge against that risk. Russia is packaging both the disease and the cure.
Vietnam imports 100 percent of its oil. It depends heavily on coal. Its economy is the manufacturing floor for global electronics, textiles, and agricultural processing. Every factory in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi runs on imported energy that transits chokepoints controlled by other countries. The Iran war just showed Vietnam what happens when those chokepoints close: oil spikes, LNG disappears, fertiliser vanishes, and the IEA releases its largest emergency reserves in history while telling the world no country is immune.
Nuclear power does not transit the Strait of Hormuz. Uranium does not require marine insurance from Lloyd’s of London. A reactor in Ninh Thuan does not stop producing electricity because an Iranian drone hits a Qatari gas terminal 7,000 kilometres away. That is the sales pitch. And Rosatom just closed it during the most compelling energy crisis demonstration in modern history.
The deeper signal is uranium. Global uranium supply is already tight. Kazakhstan produces 43 percent of the world’s uranium and Russia controls approximately 44 percent of global enrichment capacity. Every new reactor Rosatom sells tightens the enrichment bottleneck and deepens the dependency on Russian nuclear fuel services. Vietnam is not escaping energy dependence. It is transferring it from the Strait of Hormuz to the Rosatom supply chain. The chokepoint moves from a waterway to a centrifuge.
Putin is earning an extra 7.7 billion euros from the oil price spike his ally’s war created while simultaneously selling nuclear plants to countries fleeing the oil price spike his ally’s war created. The war funds the drones. The drones fund the oil spike. The oil spike funds the nuclear sales. The nuclear sales fund Rosatom. Rosatom evacuates Bushehr with one hand and signs Ninh Thuan with the other. The circle is complete.