Russia to hold more nuclear talks with Iran

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov today said that Moscow would hold another round of nuclear consultations with Iran shortly.

The Interfax news agency, citing an unnamed source in Russia’s embassy in Tehran, said the talks could take place in Moscow tomorrow and Wednesday, and would be at the level of the deputy head of Iran’s powerful National Security Council.

“Iran in the last day or two appealed to us again to hold consultations,” Lavrov said at a briefing. “They will take place in the nearest future.”

Recent talks on Russia’s offer to host Iran’s uranium enrichment program produced no results, after Tehran rejected Moscow’s demand to suspend its uranium enrichment activities.

“We are very disappointed with the way Iran has been conducting itself in these negotiations, absolutely not helping those who want to provide for finding peaceful ways to resolve the whole situation surrounding the Iranian nuclear programme,” Lavrov said.

“Contradictory signals are coming from Tehran. One day they reject it, the other day they don’t,” he said.

Earlier today, Russia’s atomic energy chief, Sergei Kiriyenko, said Russia’s proposal to enrich uranium for Iran on Russian territory remained open. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi had said Tehran would no longer consider the Russian proposal.

“Russia believes that Iran, like any other state, has the right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, but the global community has the right to demand guarantees of non-proliferation. Russia has made its offer to combine these two positions,” Kiriyenko said.

“The Russian proposal has and will remain, and it’s not going to change. Attempts to extract just certain fragments of it won’t work.”

Russia has made its enrichment offer contingent on Tehran suspending its own enrichment effort, but Iranian officials have rejected the link.

Iran insists its programme is designed only to generate electricity, but the US claims Tehran has been working to build a bomb for more than a decade. Britain and France are also sceptical of the Iranians, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog, says it has serious questions about Iran’s programme.

Lavrov denied that Russia would trade support for the hard US position on Iran for Washington’s approval for Moscow to join the World Trade Organisation.

“You know, we will not exchange what should belong to us by right for anything,” Lavrov told the Vremya Novostei daily after returning from talks in the United States last week.

Lavrov also criticised the US stance toward Tehran, accusing Washington of using the nuclear crisis “to solve some political tasks in their relations with the (current) regime.”

Lavrov called again for the main players in the crisis – Russia, the United States, France, Germany, Britain and China – to meet with UN nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei in Vienna, Austria, and he insisted that ElBaradei’s agency remain central to solving the crisis.

“But sometimes our Western partners propose acting according to this logic: since there’s not clarity (in Iran’s nuclear programme), then let’s put on pressure more quickly and impose sanctions,” Lavrov said.