A critical delay in the arrival of around $7bn in funding has reportedly hit the Russian-led Akkuyu project to construct Turkey’s first nuclear power plant (NPP).

The matter was addressed as Turkey’s top diplomat Hakan Fidan met Russian President Vladimir Putin and various of his officials, including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, at the Kremlin on the evening of May 27.

Speaking at a joint press conference following his meeting with counterpart Lavrov, Fidan said that there was a discussion on resolving setbacks experienced during the construction of Akkuyu NPP.

“We once again had the opportunity to observe how sensitive the Russian side is on this issue, and how closely Mr Putin follows the matter in all its detail,” said Fidan, as reported by Turkiye Today.

The launch of the first reactor at Akkuyu NPP, located on Turkey’s southern Mediterranean coast in Mersin, is already at least two years behind schedule. The project also hit a big hurdle last September when Germany declined to provide licences to Siemens Energy to deliver key components.

According to Turkish news outlet Haberturk, as things stand, the first of the four planned units now remains on track for preliminary testing by the end of this year or early 2026, but the broader project timeline is under pressure given the unresolved financial difficulty.

Amid the funding constraints, Akkuyu Nuclear JSC—the company managing the NPP project that is reliant on the expertise of Russia’s Rosatom state nuclear power corporation—is said to have redirected all available resources into finishing the first reactor unit. Project officials are reported as believing that once it goes operational, its revenue stream will help finance and accelerate the building of the remaining three units.

Sources who spoke to Haberturk did not give a clear explanation for the bottleneck hindering the transfer of the funds. However, the indications are that Rosatom, the project majority stakeholder, has been seeking financial concessions from Turkey. They include exemptions from withholding tax and other fiscal measures. Turkey has seemingly not met its demands.

The project previously experienced a financial obstacle when an attempt to wire $3bn to Turkey’s Ziraat Bank for the nuclear investment’s reserves, arranged by a partnership of Russia’s Gazprombank, US-based Citibank and JPMorgan, ran up against a US Department of Justice intervention, as reported in February by The Wall Street Journal. The US move blocked over $2bn of the transfer routed through JPMorgan, freezing the funds over alleged sanctions violations. No solution has been found as yet to release the capital.

On completion, Akkuyu NPP is to boast four VVER-1200-type pressurised water reactors with a total installed capacity of 4,800 megawatts—enough to meet around 10% of Turkey’s electricity demand. It is the first nuclear plant in the world built under a build-own-operate (BOO) model by a country in another country.