Shopkeepers gathered at the Tehran Grand Bazaar on Tuesday and chanted “This is the final battle, Pahlavi will return,” a slogan referring to Iran’s former ruling dynasty, according to a video received by Iran International.
Alexey Dedov said accusations over Iran’s role in the Ukraine war were being used as “merely a pretext for taking aggressive anti-Iran measures,” adding that both Tehran and Moscow had rejected the allegations.
“In my view, European countries are seeking to punish any state that pursues an independent foreign policy and refuses to follow directives from Brussels or other European capitals,” ISNA quoted Dedov as saying.
He said this approach was reflected first in Europe’s stance on the snapback mechanism.
Iran has emerged as one of Russia’s key backers since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and Tehran has been accused of supplying Russia with hundreds of Shahed-series attack drones.
Western governments and Kyiv say Iranian-made drones have played a central role in Russia’s aerial campaign, allegations Iran has repeatedly denied or played down.
“If the issue was not Ukraine, European countries would have found other pretexts to take hostile action against Iranian officials with the same self-serving approach,” Dedov said.
He said relations between Moscow and Tehran had reached an unprecedented level in recent years, adding that cooperation in the gas, electricity and nuclear sectors was expanding.
“Bushehr nuclear power plant is our main joint project, with its first unit having been successfully operating for more than 10 years,” he said, adding that construction of the second and third units was continuing and about 700 Russian specialists were working on the project.
The euro was trading around 1.72 million rials and the pound at about 19.94 million rials, traders said.
The latest slide follows sharp swings since late December, when the currency’s plunge helped trigger protests in Tehran and other cities that have increasingly taken on a broader political edge.
The government has floated new relief measures after moving to curb access to subsidized foreign exchange used for importing basic goods, a system critics say has fueled distortions and rent-seeking while failing to contain inflation.
President Masoud Pezeshkian’s administration has signaled it will shift support toward households, including a proposed monthly electronic credit or coupon scheme aimed at cushioning low-income families from price rises as the subsidy regime is rolled back.
Iran’s economy has been hit by years of sanctions and chronic inflation, and many Iranians turn to hard currency and gold as stores of value during bouts of political and economic uncertainty.