Russia and Vietnam signed an intergovernmental agreement on Tuesday for the construction of Vietnam's first nuclear power plant, a deal that will be executed by Rosatom — Russia's state nuclear corporation and one of the few globally competitive Russian industries still operating without interruption in the face of Western sanctions. The plant, expected to be located in Ninh Thuận Province on Vietnam's south-central coast, will consist of two VVER-1200 reactors with a combined capacity of 2,400 megawatts. First concrete is targeted for 2029, with commercial operation projected in 2036 at the earliest.
The timing is deliberate. Russia is navigating its fourth consecutive year of comprehensive Western economic sanctions, and Rosatom has become one of the Kremlin's most effective instruments for building alternative relationships with non-aligned nations. As of March 2026, Rosatom has nuclear construction contracts active in Bangladesh, Egypt, Turkey, India, China, Hungary, and now Vietnam. No other nuclear vendor — not France's EDF, America's Westinghouse, or South Korea's KEPCO — has a comparable pipeline in the Global South. The political strategy behind that commercial success is straightforward: nuclear infrastructure creates 60-to-80-year dependencies. A country that builds a Russian reactor becomes, in effect, a long-term Russian partner by necessity.
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