Moscow: Russia has said it is confident that Iran is fulfilling all its obligations under a multilateral agreement on its nuclear programme and will not take part in any talks on amending the deal.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov made the remarks Saturday at an international nuclear weapons non-proliferation conference here, TASS news agency reported.
Russia is not ready to participate in any talks on amending the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Ryabkov was quoted as saying.
The deal is delicately balanced and any change could cause the collapse of the whole agreement, he warned.
The JCPOA was reached between Iran, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council —Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — plus Germany, in July 2015. Under the deal, Iran agreed to halt its nuclear weapon program in exchange for economic aid and lifting of international sanctions.
However, on October 13, US President Donald Trump called for decertifying the agreement, alleging Iran had committed "multiple violations".
Though the decertification would not mean Washington exiting the Iran nuclear deal at the moment, it would open a 60-day window in which the U.S. Congress could reimpose nuclear-related sanctions on Iran.
International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Yukiya Amano said last week that Iran was implementing the JCPOA under a robust verification regime.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump's new Iran policy clearly represents a dangerous rejection of diplomacy in favor of confrontation. But it's more than that: It's a major shift toward a much closer alignment of U.S. policy with that of the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Whether explicitly or not, Trump's vow to work with Congress to renegotiate the Iran nuclear agreement, and his explicit threat to withdraw from the deal if no renegotiation takes place, appear to be satisfying the hardline demands Netanyahu has made of Washington's policy toward Tehran.
Specifically, Netanyahu has continued to demand that Trump either withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or make far-reaching changes that he knows are impossible to achieve. In his September 17 speech to the UN General Assembly, Netanyahu declared, "Israel's policy toward the nuclear deal with Iran is very simple: Change it or cancel it." And he made no secret of what that meant: If Trump doesn't "cancel" the deal, he must get rid ofits "sunset clause" and demand that Iran end its advanced centrifuges and long-range missile program, among other fundamentally unattainable objectives.
Trump's statement last Friday managed to include both of the either/or choices that Netanyahu had given him. He warned that, if Congress and America's European allies do not agree on a plan to revise the deal, "then the agreement will be terminated." He added that the agreement "is under continuous review," and our participation "can be canceled by me, as president at any time."
One provision the administration wants Congress to put into amended legislation would allow sanctions to be imposed if Iran crosses certain "trigger points," which would include not only nuclear issues but the Israeli demand that Iran stop its long-range missile program. Ballistic missiles were never included in the JCPOA negotiations for an obvious reason: Iran has the same right to develop ballistic missiles as any other independent state, and it firmly rejected pro forma demands by the Barack Obama administration to include the issue in negotiations.