Britain will supply enriched uranium to power Ukraine’s nuclear plants over the next two years, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced ahead of a G7 session in Évian, France, on 16 June. The £210 million ($282 million) arrangement, drawn from UK Export Finance, lets the British company Urenco feed Ukraine’s state operator, Energoatom.
The pledge lands the morning after a Russian barrage killed at least 11 people across Ukraine and set fire to the Dormition Cathedral inside Kyiv’s Pechersk Lavra. Securing the fuel, Starmer’s office said, strengthens Ukraine’s ability to keep generating power as Moscow keeps striking the grid—an effort to power Ukraine “through the winters ahead.”
Fuel for half the grid
The supply line matters because Ukraine cut its dependence on Russian nuclear fuel after the full-scale invasion in February 2022. Nuclear power now generates roughly half the country’s electricity across 15 reactors—six of them at Zaporizhzhia, held by Russian forces since the early months of the war. Starmer and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy struck the deal at Downing Street last week.
Zelenskyy attended the Évian summit, where the first session was given over to peace and security for Ukraine and Europe. Starmer said the G7 should go further to secure Ukraine “the just and lasting peace it deserves.”
A widening squeeze on Russia’s oil
The fuel deal came packaged with a fresh wave of sanctions on Russia’s oil trade. The new measures push the number of shadow fleet vessels under UK restrictions toward 600 and name financial systems that route around sanctions to fund weapons purchases, the government said.
The sanctions follow the first shadow fleet boarding Britain has run on its own. Royal Marines and crime-agency officers boarded the Cameroon-flagged tanker Smyrtos in the English Channel in the early hours of 14 June, a six-hour operation that left the vessel anchored off England’s southern coast, as reported by Euromaidan Press. Britain had previously assisted French and US-led seizures; the Smyrtos was the first it led itself—a shift from designating tankers on paper to stopping them at sea.
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