Putin Fears Canada

The receipts are starting to pile up.

What does Kirill Dmitriev — Putin’s money man, roaming the Western world as Moscow’s smiling dealmaker — have in common with Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, America’s oligarch class, the MAGA influencer who never grew up, and the other influencer who thinks he grew up too much?

They have all found the same target.

This →

Malignant actors do not usually spend their time attacking countries that are irrelevant. They attack countries that are becoming inconvenient. And Canada is becoming very inconvenient.

Not in one lane. In several.

Canada is becoming more important to allied energy security, Arctic security, defence-industrial supply chains, critical minerals, LNG flows, and nuclear fuel. It is becoming one of the countries that can help the democratic world reduce dependence on coercive suppliers. That is exactly why the pressure is rising.

For decades, Putin worked to turn key commodity markets into instruments of leverage. Gas. Oil. Nuclear fuel. The point was never just revenue. The point was dependency. If Europe needed Russian gas, Russia had political leverage. If the world needed Russian oil flows, Russia had market leverage. If the nuclear sector depended on Russian uranium, conversion, enrichment, or fuel services, Moscow retained another pressure point inside the democratic alliance.

That structure is now cracking.

Russia has already lost much of its gas weapon over Europe. The oil market is fragmenting under sanctions, alternative suppliers, and parallel flows. LNG and oil will not disappear from Russia’s economy, but the old dream of using energy dominance as a clean coercive weapon is weaker than it was.

That leaves nuclear.

• Canada’s uranium production has almost doubled since 2022. Output rose from 7,351 tonnes in 2022 to 14,309 tonnes in 2024.

• Canada’s share of natural uranium delivered to EU utilities rose from 31.9% in 2023 to 33.9% in 2024.

• Over the same period, Russia’s share fell from 23.81% to 15.63%.

That is the “eating Russian market share” point.

Cameco’s production did fall in 2025, from 23.4 million pounds of U3O8 in 2024 to 21.0 million pounds in 2025. But that was not a structural collapse. It was an operational issue at McArthur River/Key Lake, caused by development delays and slower-than-expected ground freezing as the company transitioned into new mining areas.

It is important. Because the long-term direction has not changed.

Canada is expanding its role in the global nuclear-energy market. This year, Canada also struck a nine-year uranium deal with India, further widening its contribution to a market Russia has long treated like its private fiefdom.

Nuclear energy is one of the last major areas where Russia still holds serious global leverage. And that is where Canada becomes dangerous to Moscow. Canada is not merely talking about energy security. Canada has the uranium, the mining base, the fuel-cycle relevance, the engineering capacity, and the allied credibility to help break one of Putin’s remaining choke points.

So yes, Russia is pushing disinformation into Canada to inflame internal division. And yes, Russian-linked voices are also amplifying Trump-world threats and jokes about Canada’s sovereignty.

Those are not separate stories.

They are the same story.

Russia wants Canada weaker at home and more isolated abroad, because a confident Canada makes life harder for Moscow. Especially if Canada helps the free world build a nuclear-energy system that does not pass through Putin’s hands.

So obviously, on one side, they push misinformation into Canada to stoke internal division. On the other, they encourage Trump’s oligarch world to bully Canada from the outside.

Expect more of this nonsense from here. Not less.

That is good. It means Canada is doing something right. And it means that something is beginning to strike fear in dark hearts.

This is the democratic world’s path to safety. Not fantasy independence. Not pretending dependency can be taken to zero. That is not how the world works.

The task is to constrain the dependencies that can be weaponized against us, then control the ones that remain. In the short term, that means cutting the world’s commodity dependency on two autocrats — and one man desperate to become one.

In the long term, it means cutting the world’s dependency on hydrocarbons. And the backbone for that transition is countries like Canada, Australia, and Norway — trusted resource democracies with the commodities, energy systems, engineering base, and political credibility to replace hostile leverage with allied supply.

That is why Canada’s uranium story is bigger than uranium. It is one piece of a much larger democratic safety architecture. If Russia loses its grip on LNG, oil, uranium, and nuclear supply chains, it loses the ability to turn energy into coercion.

If Canada helps make that happen, then of course Moscow will want Canada divided, bullied, distracted, and smaller than it is. But that is exactly why the answer cannot be retreat. The answer is production, exports, alliances, nuclear fuel, critical minerals, and a country confident enough to understand its own strategic weight.

Canada is not just defending itself here. It is helping build the world Putin and his friends fear.

Your support for Concis Canada is critical in moments like this. It allows us to dig deeper, investigate harder, and keep Canadians informed about the decisions shaping their future. It will help us reach more people across the country and show the world the role Canada plays within the democratic alliance.