His visit will be closely scrutinized. Not only because Vladimir Putin has not been out of Russia for many months – with the exception of his trip to occupied Crimea in April – but above all because he has been targeted, since March 17, by a warrant of arrest by the International Criminal Court for its responsibility for war crimes committed by its troops in Ukraine.
Akkuyu is the symbolic project of the Turkish-Russian honeymoon that began in 2016. In April 2018, Putin and Erdogan had already launched the construction site of this power plant together, a symbol of growing cooperation between the two authoritarian regimes and hailed by Erdogan as a “historic moment for [their] development and [their] historical cooperation with Russia”.
The Akkuyu power plant, which will have four reactors and whose total cost is estimated at $20 billion, is expected to produce 35 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity per year and cover about 10% of Turkey’s national needs. It will be the first in the world to be commissioned under a build-own-operate contract. The Russian operator Rosatom will thus ensure the design, construction, maintenance, operation and dismantling… on a piece of territory placed under the authority of Russia.
According to military sources, Moscow may even be tempted to install defense and eavesdropping systems there. Russia would thus benefit from a window on the Mediterranean, a stone’s throw from the Syrian coast and its naval base in Tartous… on the territory of a NATO member country!
Another major concern is that the land that hosts the nuclear facility is located on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, not far from an area with high seismic risk. The Akkuyu site, licensed over 40 years ago, is 25 kilometers from a fault. As early as 1991, a Turkish scientific study advised against the construction of a power plant in this area, which was described as dangerous.
Nearby, in Adana, 140 people were killed in an earthquake in 1998. And more recently, on February 6, a double earthquake in eastern Turkey killed more than 50,000 people and caused tens of thousands injured. The epicenter was 200 km from Akkuyu.
