On 20 November, an online ceremony marked the installation of the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) for the first unit of the Dabaa Nuclear Power Plant in Egypt.
President Abdel‑Fattah Al‑Sisi and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin joined online to give the go‑ahead for the milestone installation, which the Egyptian president described as “a decisive step towards the completion of the plant”.
Manufactured by the Russian nuclear company Rosatom, the RPV houses the core of the plant where the controlled nuclear fission reaction takes place. It arrived on site in October this year. During the ceremony, Putin said that the step was “a major success”. Rosatom issued a statement saying that it was the major achievement of the year.
Located at Dabaa, 320 km northwest of Cairo, the plant is designed to have four units for maximum fuel efficiency. It is the first Generation III+ reactor in the Arab region.
The project’s cost is estimated at a little under $29 billion, of which Russia is financing about 85 per cent as a state loan with a repayment period of 22 years at an interest rate of three per cent.
The instalment of the RPV came exactly 10 years after Egypt and Russia signed an initial agreement for Russia to build and finance Egypt’s first nuclear power plant on 19 November 2015. Two years later, the initial contracts were signed to give the go-ahead for the construction.
However, according to Alaa Al-Hadidi, a former Egyptian ambassador to Russia and an international relations professor of practice at the AUC School of Global Affairs and Public Policy in Cairo, the story of the Dabaa reactor goes back to November 2010.
On 10 November 2010, then minister of electricity and energy Hassan Younis arrived in Moscow for a few days’ visit to examine chances of cooperation on nuclear energy. “That visit was one of many that Younis made to explore Egypt’s best option for a partner to build the nuclear reactor it had its mind set on,” Al-Hadidi said.
At the time, he said, there were four obvious options for Egypt to partner with — France, South Korea, Russia, and the US. “Right from the beginning, it was very clear that Russia was possibly the best of the four choices,” he said.
What made Russia then, and still makes it now, a favourite choice, Al-Hadidi said, is the Russian style of conducting business and politics. On the business side, Russia would not charge exaggerated interest rates, and it would not try to restrict control of the relevant know-how.
On the political side, Russia would not mix its cooperation with Egypt on the nuclear reactor with Egyptian political developments in line with its policy of non-interference.
Having accompanied Younis and the team of Egyptian nuclear engineers who visited Russia in November 2010, Al-Hadidi said it was clear from the beginning that Russia’s Rosatom was keen to do business in Egypt “not just because Egypt is an important Middle Eastern country that Russia wants to have close cooperation with, but also because the Russians sensed that Egypt was serious and keen” about the reactor.
Like other diplomats familiar with the modern and contemporary history of Egyptian-Russian relations, Al-Hadidi said that the interruption in the early 1970s of the industrial and military cooperation that had been set out under former president Gamal Abdel-Nasser had “left a scar in Soviet political quarters”.
In September 1981, former president Anwar Al-Sadat, who embraced a close partnership with the US, severed relations with the then Soviet Union owing to alleged attempts by Moscow to undermine Sadat’s pursuit of Egyptian-Israeli peace.
A few weeks later, Sadat was assassinated, and his successor, former president Hosni Mubarak, acted to relaunch relations with a country where he had done graduate military studies. In 1984, full diplomatic relations between Egypt and Russia were reinstated.
“When Mubarak arrived in power in October 1981, he was not planning to shake the established parameters of Egyptian-Israeli peace or the Egyptian-American partnership, but he was certainly willing to re-engage the Soviets,” Al-Hadidi said.
He added that before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, Mubarak had already taken steps to revive as many elements of Egyptian-Russian cooperation as possible.
“The Soviets realised that Egypt was not going to abandon its [strategic] relations with the US, and they were willing to engage cautiously as part of their keen interest to maintain a strong foothold in the region,” Al-Hadidi said.
He added that following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, Russia became more pragmatic and transactional in its international relations.
In November 2006, Mubarak made a high-profile visit to Moscow, where he was received by Putin, who served his first two terms in office between 2002 and 2008. According to Al-Hadidi, both during this period and later Putin was aware that it was in the interest of Moscow to expand its cooperation with as many countries in the region as possible as part of a strategy to expand Russian influence.
In 2010, when Dmitry Medvedev was president of the Russian Federation, Putin was prime minister. His role in engineering the country’s foreign-policy choices, including the pursuit of nuclear cooperation with leading Middle Eastern states like Egypt, should not be underestimated, according to Al-Hadidi.
With the end of the Mubarak regime in January 2011, shortly after Egypt had started a serious engagement with the Russians on the nuclear reactor, the project was postponed, Al-Hadidi said. Al-Sisi reactivated the project “even before he became president” during his visit to Russia as the then minister of defence with the then foreign minister Nabil Fahmi in February 2014.
“Putin knew very well that he was not just meeting with Egypt’s next president, and he knew that Al-Sisi was serious about engaging with Russia in a very serious way,” Al-Hadidi said. This, he added, had dispelled a traditional Russian apprehension about Egypt reaching out to Moscow when relations with the US were going through a bad phase.
“It is true that in the summer of 2013 and throughout a good part of 2014 there was tension with the US and some other Western states, but for Putin this is not where Al-Sisi was coming from,” Al-Hadidi said.
“He thought that Al-Sisi was genuinely keen on opening up avenues of international relations, and this assessment was proven right as the two leaders signed the first agreement on the Dabaa reactor in November 2015,” he added.
According to Al-Hadidi, there was a lull in the process for a couple of years as the Russians were overwhelmed by the crash of a flight carrying Russian tourists back home from a Red Sea resort in October 2015. However, “at the end of the day, this was too big a project for Russia to compromise on, even within the unfortunate context of the crash,” he added.
“Building nuclear reactors is one of the main sources of foreign currency for Russia, along with selling wheat and arms,” Al-Hadidi said. He added, however, that the Russians are keen to engage with countries that are allies with the US.
“It was in 2010 that Russia and Turkey agreed that Rosatom would build the first Turkish nuclear reactor,” he said. In 2018, Rosatom started building the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, which is likely to be the first such build-own-operate plant in the world.
“When it comes to Turkey, we are not just talking about a Middle Eastern [strategic partner] like Egypt; we are effectively talking about a NATO member who did not go to America or France but went to Russia” for nuclear technology, Al-Hadidi said.
“This was a major political point scored by Moscow; but it was also a political choice made by Turkey to opt for a wider scope of international cooperation than in NATO or even in the European Union whose membership it had pursued.”
Today, Al-Hadidi said, it is more significant for Russia than before to cooperate with countries like Egypt and Turkey. Russia lost its number one Middle Eastern ally with the fall of the Al-Assad regime in Syria in December 2024, and Iran, another close Middle Eastern partner, was weakened by the Israeli strikes in June this year and by the loss of the strength of its proxy allies, including Hizbullah in Lebanon.
“Obviously, those were foes of the US, which is not the case either for Egypt or for Turkey,” Al-Hadidi said. However, he added that they remain important partners to work with.
He said that it was unlikely that the US would compromise its relations with Egypt over the Egyptian-Russian cooperation on the nuclear power plant or any other future industrial or other forms of cooperation.
“I think the Americans, including the current Trump administration, realise that the management of international relations has long passed the phase of ally-or-foe that dominated the Cold War,” he said. But there are some guiding lines for the management of a partnership like the one between Egypt and the US.
“This does not just apply to the case of Russia, but also to China, which is currently a strategic partner with Russia after the strategic alliance signed between the two countries in the winter of 2022,” Al-Hadidi said.
“It is a moment when political hedging has been incorporated into international relations, for sure,” he added.
Within these parameters, Al-Hadidi said, Egypt decided to join the BRICS group of countries to gradually expand its relations with Russia and to opt for closer economic cooperation with China.
He argued that it is highly likely that “upon careful consideration” Cairo will expand work on these tracks without having to worry about American apprehensions.
“Today, we are seeing the US president working to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, and this is not just about the pronounced interest of Trump to get the Nobel Prize,” Al-Hadidi said. He added that it is also about the keen interest of the US to re-open the Russian market to American companies that had to pull out at the start of the Russian war in Ukraine.
Nor will Egypt have to worry much about possible apprehension from the European Union with regards to the Cairo-Moscow rapport. “It is true that the EU has an issue with Russia over Ukraine, but it is also true that the EU counts on cooperation with Egypt with regards to controlling [undocumented] migration from the south to the north of the Mediterranean,” he said.
In any case, he added, “irrespective of the apprehensions of some about the value of the nuclear reactor, I am genuinely convinced that this is an important project that is worth pursuing.”
“Working with Russia in particular on this project is an opportunity to pass know-how about nuclear technology to a new generation of Egyptian experts and engineers.”
Al-Hadidi argued that the Dabaa takes bilateral Egyptian-Russian relations to a new level beyond the traditional forms of cooperation through Egyptian wheat purchases from Russia or Russian tourism to Egypt.
“More significantly, it positions Egypt among those countries that possess nuclear technology for peaceful uses,” he said.
“There have been moments when some might have questioned whether this project would see the light of the day, but the moment of questioning is over. The Dabaa plant is now an irreversible project,” Al-Hadidi stated.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 27 November, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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