Armenia offered ‘white elephant’ – Alexey Mukhin on US modular reactors

Speaking with Alpha News, political scientist and American affairs expert Alexey Mukhin commented on the visit of US Vice President JD Vance to Armenia and Azerbaijan.

“First of all, this is a blow to Armenia’s interests, because nuclear modules of this capacity are compact, very expensive, and generally used in remote areas where building a full-scale nuclear power plant is not possible. And you may have noticed that they are not used in the United States precisely because of their high cost. It seems to me that Armenia has been offered a kind of ‘white elephant,’ which will be extremely difficult and costly to maintain. So I’m not sure whether Russia’s interests are being undermined here. Russia clearly sees all the proposals coming from Western countries, including the US, and, I must say, views them with sadness. This sadness was reflected in the sharp remarks made by Sergey Lavrov in recent interviews. Russia sees that, unfortunately, these initiatives are not in the interests of the countries that accept them, even though they believe they are some kind of benefit,” the expert said.

Commenting on Vance’s visit to Azerbaijan and the enthusiastic statements in local media about meeting the US Vice President, Mukhin stressed that this is merely a reflection of Trump’s rhetoric and adherence to that trend.

“The more pompous the descriptions of such agreements sound, the more you realize that there is actually little substance behind them. I believe Azerbaijani media are simply aligning themselves with Trump’s rhetoric: that all deals are wonderful, everything is great, everything is fine. But in reality, that’s not the case. Reality undermines such narratives. I believe Azerbaijan could also find itself in a very awkward situation here,” Mukhin concluded.