The US is in active talks to use Russian technology for an LNG plant in Alaska, Kremlin deputy chief of staff Maxim Oreshkin said on October 28.

Russia is "the first and only country in the world" to have built technology for turnkey liquefaction plants mounted on platforms placed in coastal waters, Oreshkin told a media forum held alongside the Russia-Africa summit in Moscow, the Prime news agency reported. A "gigantic plant" built near Murmansk in recent years assembles the platforms, each of them in effect a ready-made LNG plant, he said.

"The use of such platforms in Alaska is now being actively discussed, and our American partners understand that using Russian technological solutions gives far more efficient economics than the solutions the US itself has now," Oreshkin said.

The yard Oreshkin described is Novatek's (MOEX: NVTK) Centre for Construction of Large-Tonnage Offshore Structures at Belokamenka, which builds liquefaction trains on concrete gravity-based foundations and has been under US sanctions since February 2024. Putin said after his August 2025 summit with Donald Trump that the two sides were discussing joint energy projects in Alaska, but Oreshkin's comments are the most specific yet from the Kremlin, and they come days after US reporting that Novatek executives discussed funding Polar LNG, a US start-up planning an export plant on Alaska's North Slope, through an intermediary. Polar LNG's chief executive resigned in September after learning where the money came from.

Polar LNG said in March it was seeking US approval to buy discounted equipment from Novatek's sanctioned Arctic LNG 2 project, including a partly built liquefaction train, for a first phase costing $8bn-9bn. In February, Texas investor Gentry Beach said he had signed a deal with Novatek in autumn 2025 to use a mobile LNG unit built at its Murmansk-region yard. Novatek has told the New York Times it intends to take a minority stake in Polar LNG, but denies controlling the venture.

Oreshkin credited Western sanctions for the platforms, saying Russia relied on American oil and gas technology 20-30 years ago - an argument Putin also made at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum in June.

"None of this would have happened if we had not worked on our own technological sovereignty, if there had not been additional sanctions pressure on the Russian energy industry. It forced us to implement our own solutions, and our engineers to come up with new technological approaches," he said.

Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak was more guarded on the same day, saying Russia is not in talks with US companies about a return to Russian oil and gas projects. "Whether they come back or not depends first and foremost on them," Novak said on the sidelines of the forum, Vedomosti reported. The Financial Times reported on October 27 that Washington and Moscow were discussing reviving a joint US-Russian oil project off Sakhalin once the war in Ukraine ends, and a role for US companies in restoring Russian oil supplies to Europe through the Druzhba pipeline.

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said "quite possibly" when asked by CNBC on October 27 whether more tankers of Russian diesel would follow the first cargo shipped under a US sanctions waiver. Wright has defended the deal as an incentive for Moscow to end the war.