US Warns Of Sanctions On Iran Over Drone Supplies To Russia
The United States will crack down on Iranian drone transfers to Russia and third parties helping Iran in UAVs and missiles, the State Department said Monday.
The United States will crack down on Iranian drone transfers to Russia and third parties helping Iran in UAVs and missiles, the State Department said Monday.
The US also agrees with British and French assessments that Iran supplying drones to Russia would violate a UN Security Council resolution that endorsed the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and six powers, State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said.
"Earlier today our French and British allies publicly offered the assessment that Iran’s supply of these UAVs (for) Russia is a violation of UN Security Council resolution 2231," Patel told reporters, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones. "This is something that we agree with."
Ukraine has reported a spate of Russian attacks using Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones in recent weeks. Iran denies supplying the drones to Russia, while the Kremlin has not commented.
The State Department assessed that Iranian drones were used on Monday in a morning rush hour attack on the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, an official said. White House spokesperson Karinne Jean-Pierre also accused Tehran of lying when it says Iranian drones are not being used by Russia in Ukraine.
Resolution 2231 endorsed the deal between Iran and Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States that limited Tehran's uranium enrichment activity, making it harder for Iran to develop nuclear arms while lifting international sanctions.
Under the resolution, a conventional arms embargo on Iran was in place until October 2020. Despite US efforts under former president Donald Trump, who took the United States out of the deal in 2018, to extend the arms embargo, the Security Council rejected this, paving the way for Iran to resume arms exports.
However, Western diplomats said the resolution still includes restrictions on missiles and related technologies that last until October 2023 and that encompass the export and purchase of advanced military systems such as drones.
European are still not sure if they would impose sanctions on Iran for the drone transfers. Arriving in Luxemburg Monday for a meeting of EU foreign ministers, Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, said Europe would look for “concrete evidence” over reports that Russia had used Shahed-136 drones in recent weeks.
But the United States is certain Russia is using Iranian drones. "It is our belief that these UAVs that are transferred from Iran to Russia and used by Russia in Ukraine are among the weapons that would remain embargoed under 2231," Patel said.
The Washington Post Sunday also cited “an intelligence assessment shared in recent days with Ukrainian and US officials [that] contends Iran’s armaments industry is preparing a first shipment of [surface-to-surface] Fateh-110 and Zolfagher missiles…”
The Biden Administration and its European allies, France, Germany and the United Kingdom that unsuccessfully negotiated for nearly 18 months with Iran to revive an Obama-era nuclear deal, the JCPOA, seem to realize that ignoring Tehran’s actions will not help soften its stance in reaching a deal.
Recent popular protests have also cast a further shadow on the attitude of Western countries toward the clerical regime in Iran. Government security forces have killed nearly 250 people including many children since mid-September after the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman, at the hands of the ‘hijab police’.
During this period, Khamenei has made it clear at least twice that he wants the protests to be crushed and protesters punished heavy-handedly. Although a few officials including Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi and Mashhad Friday prayers Imam Ahmad Alamolhoda have echoed Khamenei’s call for violent crackdown, several politicians including one government minister, a senior aide, and several lawmakers and former state officials have pointed out that the regime needs to make compromises on some of its values in order to peacefully curb the dissent.
Khamenei’s senior aide Ali Larijani, a former speaker of the Iranian parliament, said in an October 12 interview with Ettela’at Newspaper, which is owned and maintained by Khamenei’s office, that the regime’s “insistence on its social values will elicit violent reactions on the part of the protesters.” Quoting another state official as saying that more than 50 percent of Iranian women do not observe the government-imposed dress code, Larijani said: “When a behavior is so widely prevalent in the society it is wrong to involve the police in a bid to curb that behavior.”
Meanwhile on October 11, referring to the government and Iranian hard-liners’ attempt to impose a rekigious lifestyle on modern Iranian women, Tourism Minister Ezzatollah Zarghami asked in a tweet that “what should the people do if they do not wish to be guided by the morality police?”
On Friday, Khamenei’s representative and the Friday prayers imam of Mashhad, accused the critics, including the minister, of undermining the holy Koran and Iran’s constitutional law. He also accused the protesters of not believing in God and his prophet; an accusation that could entail the death sentence for the protesters.
On the same day, Iranian lawmaker, Gholamreza Montazeri, who is the deputy chairman of the Cultural Committee of the Iranian parliament, expressed his opposition to a violent crackdown on protests and called for understanding the new generation which comprises a majority of protesters.
However, instead of addressing Khamenei, which could have endangered his position as a lawmaker, he chose to address the Interior Minister who had echoed Khamenei’s statement. He said: “If you deprive Iranian protestors of voicing their criticism of the system, they will turn to strangers and talk to them.”
Earlier in this week, former labor minister Ali Rabiei and former presidential chief of staff Mohamad Ali Abtahi warned the government, and in fact Khamenei, that “if the dissatisfactions are not addressed properly, dissent will remain active and sooner or later it will find its way into the streets.” They added that "the world is listening to the voice of Iranians' protest and stressed that this voice should be also heard inside Iran."
On Thursday, the editor of Jomhouri Eslami newspaper, Masih Mohajeri and senior cleric Ayatollah Abdollah Javadi Amoli called on the government, as they too shied away from addressing Khamenei for fear of repression, to understand the protesters and the causes of dissent and bring about changes that would make the government efficient in dealing with the country’s problems.
However, regardless of all the criticism and advice from regime insiders, Khamenei finds it hard to listen to anyone. Earlier this week, when Judiciary Chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei called for a dialogue between the government and the protesters, he was forced in less than a day to change his words and order the courts of law under his jurisdiction to deal with protesters with utmost firmness and not to ignore the slightest wrongdoing.