French President Emmanuel Macron spent last week in Central Asia, courting trade relations with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in the interest of boosting France’s energy security. Both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are naturally rich in the uranium that France depends on to keep its nuclear-heavy energy industry running, and Macron is highly invested in diversifying the country’s uranium supply chains in order to ensure that turbulent global geopolitics don’t leave his country in the dark.
Anonymous sources with insight into the French President’s strategy suggested that France is trying to take advantage of current political instability in the region to not only reduce their own dependence on Russian exports, but to help these former soviet republics to do the same – while also forging stronger strategic alliances for their own interests. In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, global energy markets have been thrown into turmoil.