German authorities said Wednesday they were giving the green light to a controversial French-Russian nuclear project which critics fear will enable spying and sabotage by Moscow. The planned joint venture by a subsidiary of French company Framatome and Russia’s state-owned nuclear power agency Rosatom is aimed at producing fuel rods used in Russian-designed reactors.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. The project would be based at Framatome’s fuel rod assembly facility in the town of Lingen in the state of Lower Saxony. Framatome’s subsidiary ANF (Advanced Nuclear Fuels) applied for permission for the project in March 2022, just weeks after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The state’s environment ministry said in a statement Wednesday it had “decided to approve” the project. This was despite the state’s environment minister, Christian Meyer, restating his position that “dealings and close co-operation with Putin’s nuclear agency are totally wrong”. He said however that his ministry had “no legal possibility to reject or put a time limit to the application” in the absence of sanctions on Rosatom. Rosatom has been exempted from the successive rounds of EU sanctions imposed against Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. ‘Dangerous to security’ Meyer said that one of the conditions of the approval was that Rosatom employees or those from Russian nuclear fuel manufacturer TVEL would only be allowed to enter the site “in very limited cases and accompanied by the relevant inspectorate”.