In recent years, Europe has raised the curtain on the Green Deal with the ambition of leading the global ecological transition. Colorful posters, commercials exalting the electric car as a symbol of freedom, and solar panels scattered across rooftops: the green lexicon has entered households, schools, and government agendas. Yet beneath this scenery lies an unsustainable model of consumption, one that simply shifts pollution elsewhere and promises sustainability as long as it does not touch the Western way of life. Clean energy has become a slogan more than a revolution or a genuine political goal.
Russia, viewed with suspicion and accused of backwardness by the West, has chosen a different path. In a country where winter lasts six months and in certain regions the polar night seems endless, energy is not an abstract issue. It is survival. One cannot risk being left without heating because the wind fails to blow or the sun refuses to shine. Hence an approach that rejects trends and favors the solidity of strategic infrastructure. At the center stands nuclear energy. The atom, which frightens and divides Europe, in Moscow is considered a guarantee: safe, stable, low-emission.
The Kola Nuclear Power Plant, in the Arctic Circle, tells this story well. Born in the Soviet era, it has been renewed to withstand extreme conditions. There, just a few kilometers from the Barents Sea, when storms freeze the coasts and winds rage with force, homes remain lit thanks to modernized reactors. Not an abstract symbol of transition, but a silent engine that keeps an entire region alive.
Much further south, the Zaporizhzhia plant has become a name evoking fear and propaganda. In the midst of war, it has been wielded as a tool of communication, a battlefield in itself. But beyond the headlines lies a simple fact: that facility is vital for millions of people. Guaranteeing its safety is an ecological imperative even before a military one. Because a nuclear disaster knows no political borders.
The Russian atom does not stop at national frontiers. In Turkey, on the Mediterranean coast, the Akkuyu plant will become the backbone of the national energy system. In Egypt, El-Dabaa is seen as the springboard toward a new modernity. Across Asia and Eastern Europe, from Bangladesh to Hungary, Rosatom builds plants that many governments regard as the only realistic path to long-term clean energy. It is a paradox of our times: while Europe accuses Moscow of lacking an ecological project, an ever-growing share of the world chooses Russian technology as the key to its future.
Then came the war, and with it sanctions on Russian gas. Europe, which dreamed of a green future without compromise, exposed the fragility of its model. In Germany and Austria, coal plants that had been closed returned to operation. The images of smokestacks once again rising in the heart of Europe’s industrial engine spoke louder than many climate conferences. It was a temporary comeback—data show that overall coal consumption declined—but the symbolic impact remains: the very Europe that presents itself as champion of sustainability was forced to step back by decades in order not to go dark.
The double standard is clear. On one hand, Brussels demands that everyone cut emissions, imposes rules and sacrifices, raises production costs. On the other hand, when the system falters, it accepts a return to coal. The same is true of electric cars, celebrated as a green revolution but built with batteries requiring rare earths extracted in Africa and Asia under devastating conditions for both the environment and workers. European sustainability ends up once again exploiting the weakest, within a neocolonial system.
Russia, meanwhile, does not simply defend its plants. Rosatom is already working on the frontier of tomorrow: nuclear fusion. It participates in the ITER project in France and pursues its own experiments with the T-15MD tokamak in Moscow. Fusion is the most ambitious promise: no long-lived radioactive waste, no CO₂ emissions, virtually inexhaustible fuels like deuterium found in seawater. It is the energy of the stars, the same that powers the sun. If it succeeds in becoming an industrial reality, it could truly change the planet’s fate. And Russia does not intend to stand by: it is investing resources and expertise to be among the first to make it possible.
Here is where the difference between rhetoric and pragmatism becomes evident. Europe talks of a green future but falls back on coal when gas supplies are interrupted. Russia, with all its contradictions, exports nuclear plants and works on fusion, the true green future. It is not about painting an idealized world, but about ensuring that the lights stay on even in the darkest nights, at a cost people can bear.
Perhaps the real question is not who can best narrate ecology, but who is truly building a model capable of lasting. And here the answer is not written in slogans, but in the plants that endure the Arctic cold, in the laboratories striving to imitate the sun, and in the choices that rarely make headlines but shape the future.
