| World powers eye more Iranian sanctions as Russia talks falter |
MOSCOW World powers stuck firmly to their demands on Iran during two tough days of talks in Moscow, refusing to budge on Teheran’s attempt to have various sanctions lifted, a senior US official said late on Tuesday.
“There is no softening of our position, no softening of sanctions,” the senior US administration official said after the second and last day of talks between six world powers and Iran concluded without a breakthrough.
“Sanctions will be increasing. We have told the Iranians there will be more pressure coming if this (lack of progress) proceeds forward,” the official said.
The official described talks in which the West held firmly to its demands while discussing “confidence-building measures that would move the clock to the right to create time” for a broader deal at a later date.
“We kept faith entirely with the proposals we had put on the table,” said the official in reference to an offer laid out in Baghdad last month.
France said it would continue to strengthen sanctions against Iran.
“We regret that Iran has still not made the concrete gestures that we were waiting for and that could constitute a first step towards respecting UN Security Council and IAEA resolutions,” Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said.
The US official said that in this third round of negotiations, “Iran probably for the first time in many years responded quite directly to every element of the proposal we put down in Baghdad,” the US official said.
But response did not necessarily mean agreement, the US official cautioned.
In another development, a US security institute published new satellite imagery on Wednesday which it said appeared to show further activity to clean up an Iranian military site which the UN nuclear watchdog wants to inspect, including removing earth.
The Institute for Science and International Security posted a picture from June 7 on its website which “shows what appears to be further sanitisation activity” at the site in the Parchin complex where Iran is suspected to have conducted high explosive tests.
Agencies
|
 |
|
|
| NEWS UPDATES |
|
|
|
|
|
|
