Russian Ambassador Denies Moscow Taking Iran Nuclear Deal ‘Hostage’

Stephan Klement, head of the EU delegation to the IAEA, tweeted that the move had been in “response to unacceptable remarks” by Russia. Klement condemned “Russian military aggression” against Ukraine and “resulting nuclear threats to safety of Ukrainian facilities.”

Klement did not tell Twitterati what the Russian had said. Neither did Reuters news agency in its initial report. Russian news media is now generally blocked in the EU.

In his report to the board Monday, IAEA chief Rafael Mariano Grossi highlighted “two major issues high on the international community’s agenda…the safety and security of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants amid the…military conflict, and second, making progress on the clarification of the outstanding safeguards issues” with Iran.

Russia in the 1990s withdrew all nuclear weapons from Ukraine, which had hosted a large part of the Soviet atomic arsenal, but Ukraine has several nuclear facilities, including the decommissioned Chernobyl plant, which is now occupied by Russian forces and has lost electric power, raising fears of a radiation leak.Ukraine’s state-run nuclear company Energoatom said Wednesday fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces made it impossible to immediately repair the high-voltage power line to the plant.

Grossi expressed concern in his report Monday that the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, also now under Russian control, been hit by a shall, causing a fire but no release of radiation.

Ukraine crisis, Iran talks

There has been rampant speculation over links between the Ukraine crisis and the Vienna talksover reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement since Saturday when Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow wanted assurances that Ukraine sanctions would not impact its economic and other ties with Iran, including its role in implementing the JCPOA, if a new agreement is reached.

Lavrov said that an “avalanche of aggressive sanctions that have erupted from the West − and which I understand has not yet stopped” meant Moscow needed a “guarantee that these sanctions will not in any way touch the regime of trade-economic and investment relations which is laid down in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action."

Playing down Lavrov’s concerns, the United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken Tuesday noted that Russia was “still engaged” in efforts to revive the JCPOA and stressed Washington’s and Moscow’s shared intertest in restricting Iran’s nuclear program.

In Vienna Wednesday, the US Deputy Chief of Mission to the IAEA Louis Bono told the board that Iran needed to answer agency questions over its nuclear work before 2003 as “a legal obligation separate from its JCPOA commitments.” Bono said that “significant concerns” over Iran’s responsibility for transparency under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation ‘safeguards’ rules “remain unresolved after more than two years because of Iran’s lack of substantive engagement.”

Bono welcomed the March 5 statement by Grossi and Mohammad Eslami, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, setting out a timetable by which Tehran would satisfy the agency over its queries by June 20. Bono cited Grossi in saying, “the only way these issues go away is if they are clarified to the full satisfaction of the IAEA.”

But he added, “We remain deeply concerned by the Director General’s reports that since February 2021 Iran has stopped implementing its Additional Protocol. This significantly impacts the ability of the Agency to provide credible assurance of the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran.”

During a visit to Israel on Tuesday, Pence told the Israel Hayom newspaper “I believe that the Republican Party will win control of the House and Senate in 2022 and I believe we’ll win back America and the White House in 2024… we will have a Republican president, a Republican administration”.

“And if the JCPOA [Iran deal] finds a way to be resurrected, we will be a part and a voice of a chorus of Americans with that new administration coming into office to end the JCPOA just as quickly as we ended it under the Trump-Pence administration.”

He added that “We isolated Iran like never before, we challenged their malign activities…[and] it was our administration that took down Qassem Soleimani.”

Pence noted it was “incomprehensible” to him to see the Biden administration contemplating “buying oil from Iran while we’re cutting off oil and gas exploration in the United States.”

Pence also told Fox News from Jerusalem on Tuesday that “When our administration tore up the [Iran nuclear] deal, it’s because we recognized that not only did it not prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, it guaranteed that they would be able to obtain a nuclear weapon in 10 years."

The former chief of Iranian parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Committee Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh told local media that the Russians wish to return Iran's nuclear dossier to the United Nation's Security Council.

In an interview with Khabar Online website in Tehran, Falahatpisheh also said that Iran should make sure Russia will not once again become the main player in Iran's diplomacy.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's comments demanding the exclusion of Moscow's economic ties with Iran from the sanctions imposed on Russia by the West, has once again brought Tehran-Moscow relations under the spotlight, and created uncertainty in nuclear talks that diplomats worked for 11 months to shape.

He added that under the circumstances, it is in everybody's interest that Iran gets rid of mediators and engages in talks with the United States for better results.

In another part of the interview Falahatpisheh said it was a mistake by President Ebrahim Raisi to call Russian President Vladimir Putin on the first day of the Ukraine invasion. During the telephone conversation, Raisi expressed support for Russia's position in the war and blamed the West for the Ukraine crisis.

Falahatpisheh has warned that Iran should do its best to avoid the dangerous return of its nuclear case to the UNSC. The solution he suggested for this is maintaining direct dialogue with the United States. He said that it is the Russia’s policy to tie everything to the Ukraine crisis in one way or another. He also charged that Russian negotiator Mikhail Ulyanov did his best during the Vienna talks to prevent the shaping of an agreement between Iran and the West.

Russia has publicly backed the restoration of the 2015 nuclear agreement, the JCPOA and the Vienna talks.

Falahatpisheh suggested that Iran should not make itself a prisoner of history. "Tehran should see and understand modern history and find out that Russia is playing with it," he said, adding that the Russians have not contributed to Iran's bargaining power in the negotiations. Falahatpisheh also suggested that Iranians should not wait for Russia to make a move.

He said, however, Iran should not easily give up its nuclear program and its progress, like Libya did under Muammar al Ghaddafi or Ukraine did after the Soviet Union. "We know what happened to Libya and Ukraine," Falahatpisheh said, Iran should use its nuclear program as part of the country's development plan. Companies from all over the world can be Iran's partners to ensure economic growth.

Meanwhile, according to the reformist newspaper Sharq while an agreement with the West appears to be at hand, radicals at the Iranian Parliament (Majles) are expressing their opposition to what Iran’s negotiators have achieved in Vienna. According to Sharq, the radicals who constitute a small minority in the parliament, not only oppose the negotiating team, but they are also working against Iran's national interests. Sharq called the group, presumably the most radical elements of the ultraconservative Paydari party "The anti-agreement committee."

This comes while under the current circumstances and Russia's obstructionism, the negotiators need support from inside the Iranian political establishment more than before.

The committee members, wrote Sharq, bullied Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian during his visit to parliament on Monday to brief the MPs. Sharq wrote that "independent and moderate MPs" did not show up at the meeting with the minister although they were invited to the meeting.

In joint statement to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Board of Governors, France, Germany and the United Kingdom called on Moscow not to “add extraneous conditions.”

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said Saturday Moscow was looking for guarantees that any sanctions against Russia over Ukraine would not affect “the regime of trade-economic and investment ties embedded in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [the 2015 deal] on the Iranian nuclear program.”

With talks in Vienna over JCPOA revival between Iran and six world powers – the western European trio (E3), China, Russia and the United States – reportedly nearing their end, the Ukraine crisis has cast a shadow.

The E3 said the Vienna talks were “very close to finalizing a deal that would address our most pressing and immediate non-proliferation concerns, returning Iran’s nuclear programme [sic] to JCPOA limits as well as restoring…transparency measures…The window of opportunity is closing.”

The statement called on Iran to return to limits over uranium enrichment prescribed by the 2015 deal and to prepare “to dispose of its stockpile of enriched uranium in excess of JCPOA limits.” It has been widely assumed Russia would ship out the latter.

This was a day after Ali Bagheri-Kani, Iran’s lead negotiator, left the Vienna nuclear talks and returned to Tehran for consultations. The other senior members of the Iranian team leaving the Austrian capital signaled the talks were over and that all parties now awaited decisions by politicians over reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).

Enrique Mora, the senior European Union official chairing the Vienna talks, tweeted Monday: “There are no longer expert level talks nor formal meetings…It is time, in the next few days, for political decisions to end the Vienna talks. The rest is noise.”

"We are very close to an agreement − it is essential we conclude while we still can," French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Anne-Claire Legendre told reporters in a daily briefing Tuesday. "We are concerned by the risks that further delays could weigh on the possibility of concluding."

William Burns, the director of the US Central Intelligence Agency who played a central role in negotiations leading to the JCPOA in 2015, said success in reviving it would mark a "new era in our approach to Iran’s nuclear program.”

Raisi: red lines

Iran’s official news agency IRNA confirmed Tuesday there were no topics left to be discussed in Vienna, where Iran and six world powers have aimed to revive the JCPOA, and that all sides awaited decisions in Washington, Paris, London, and Berlin that could lead to an agreement within a few days.

Tehran has said it wants lifted all US sanctions incompatible with the JCPOA, including those introduced under other topics such as terror, violations of existing sanctions or human rights violations. It also wants guarantees that Washington would not again abandon the agreement, as it did in 2018.

“We have not retreated and will never retreat from any of the [country’s] red lines,” President Ebrahim Raisi (Raeesi) said Tuesday. “In the first step, the administration has seriously pursued neutralizing the sanctions and, in the second step, it seeks the removal of the sanctions during the negotiations in full dignity.”

On Monday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said Iran agreed with Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister over his suggestion Saturday that any sanctions against Russia over Ukraine should not affect Russia’s ties with Iran. Russia is also expected to play a central role, especially in removing Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles above JCPOA limits.

Blinken: shared interests

Some analysts in Iran have detected a Russian trap, while a French presidential official warned of Russian blackmail. But emphasizing the shared interest of the US and Russia in reviving the JCPOA, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during a visit to Estonia on Tuesday that Russia had an interest in blocking any possible Iranian path to a nuclear weapon.

"We continue to work to see if we can come back to mutual compliance with Iran on the deal,” Blinken said. “Russia continues to be engaged in those efforts and it has its own interest in ensuring that Iran is not able to acquire a nuclear weapon.”