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Russia very alarmed at Iranian nuclear stance
[Al Arabiya Latest] Russia said on Friday it was "very alarmed" by Iran's failure to cooperate with the IAEA, but that it will honor a contract to deliver advanced air defense missiles to Iran."They lied to us, Dmitri!" "Yes, Volodya. We should sell them advanced air defense systems!" Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei repeated Iran's insistence that suspicions about its nuclear program were baseless. But the United States said the IAEA report lent weight to its campaign for more sanctions against Tehran. "We are very alarmed and we cannot accept this, that Iran is refusing to cooperate with the IAEA," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the radio station Ekho Moskvy. "For about 20 years, the Iranian leadership carried out its clandestine nuclear program without reporting it to the IAEA," he said. "I do not understand why there was such secrecy." The IAEA on Thursday made public its concerns over a classified analysis which concludes that Iran already has explosives expertise relevant to a workable nuclear weapon. "Some questions remain on the table and Iran has so far not reacted to them," Lavrov said. "We need to understand how several documents concerning military nuclear technology found their way to Iran." Russia -- which wields a veto in the United Nations Security Council -- has in recent weeks raised suspicions publicly about Iran's nuclear activities, after for years saying it had no evidence Tehran was seeking to build a nuclear bomb. Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko hinted that talks on a sanctions resolution could start soon. "No work is in progress at the U.N. Security Council in New York today to prepare a possible sanctions-based resolution on Iran ... However, given the current circumstances, we cannot fully rule out the possibility of starting this work." Posted by: Fred 2010-02-21 |
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