Speaking at a briefing in the framework of the 25th International Fusion Energy Conference of the IAEA, Pershukov noted that the current political situation hadn’t affected Russia’s fulfillment of its obligations under the project. “I can assure the general public that we haven’t made any changes towards reduction of the 2015­−2017 ITER project budget,” Pershukov said. This year, Russia’s participation in this project is worth about RUB 5 billion, according to Pershukov. The budget of each participating country is “floating” and each year depends on the equipment each country is supplying for the project, he said.

At the same time, since the conference was devoted to civil applications of fusion, the foreign delegates who were involved in national security programs of their countries didn’t come, Pershukov added, explaining that the work on fusion was carried out for military applications as well. Of the U.S. scientists only specialists from the national laboratories couldn’t come because of the ban imposed by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Answering the question on the potential impact of the political situation on the conference, Pershukov said that “science is outside politics, we stick to this position.”

CEO of ROSATOM Sergey Kirienko has said recently that politics has not affected a single foreign contract of the Corporation yet. “At present, not a single foreign partner has denied the signed commitments. If somebody is of two minds under the political pressure, we will find other partners,” he said. 

With this, the head of ROSATOM noted that the Corporation was actively entering new foreign markets and expects signing new international contracts in the second half of the year. As to Ukraine, the work with the country “goes on without fail,” according to Kirienko. “The Russian nuclear fuel supplies to nuclear power plants of Ukraine continue; we have not failed a single time in supplies and the Ukrainian partners haven’t failed in payments,” he assured.