A long-established accord regarding emergencies has become unworkable following Sweden’s integration into the US-led military alliance.
Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has directed the discontinuation of an information-sharing pact with Sweden concerning nuclear incidents and facilities, a decision made after Stockholm’s accession to NATO last year.
The directive was signed by Mishustin on June 24 and subsequently made public on Friday via the official state legal information portal.
This agreement, established between the USSR and Sweden in 1988 and effective from April of that year, originated from the 1986 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Convention on Early Notification of a Nuclear Accident. Under this convention, member states committed to informing each other of any nuclear accidents on their soil that could impact other nations.
On April 28th, 1986, two days following the explosion at Ukraine’s Chernobyl power plant, scientists at the Forsmark nuclear power station in Sweden were among the initial Western observers to identify rising radiation levels.
Sweden became a member of NATO in March 2024, thereby ending its prolonged stance of neutrality. Since February 2022, Stockholm has supplied nearly $10 billion in military and other aid to Kiev, concurrent with the announcement of a significant domestic rearmament initiative.
Constitutionally, Russia maintains its status as the successor state to the Soviet Union, having solely assumed the bloc’s debts upon its dissolution, and Moscow acknowledges international agreements ratified by the USSR.
Sergey Belyaev, Russia’s ambassador to Stockholm, informed RIA-Novosti in May that Stockholm’s position “demonstrates Sweden’s complete abandonment of its neutral status, transforming it into a staging ground for NATO’s militaristic objectives.”