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China said it would host nuclear talks with Iran and Russia, days after US President Donald Trump urged Tehran to negotiate a new deal over its atomic work or face military action.
"The three parties will exchange views on the Iranian nuclear issue and other issues of mutual interest," China's Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday. The meeting will take place in Beijing on Friday and be attended by deputy foreign ministers from Moscow and Tehran, it said.
The summit comes amid a flurry of diplomatic activity on Iran's expanding nuclear program. The International Atomic Energy Agency said last month that Tehran's uranium enrichment has surged since Trump's election victory in November. While Iran insists its nuclear program is for civilian purposes only, the West has longstanding concerns that the country wants to develop atomic weapons.
Last week, Trump said he had written a letter to Iran's leadership, urging it to enter talks on a new agreement. The US President walked away from an earlier deal during his first term in 2018 and little progress has been made since then to revive the accord.
An official from the United Arab Emirates delivered the letter to Iran on Wednesday, Iranian media said.
Iran has signaled it's not ready for talks with the US. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says his country won't be bullied into negotiations and that Trump's decision to tear-up the original 2015 accord showed he cannot be trusted or taken seriously. Still, the country's economic strains have led some senior officials to conclude that negotiations are needed to get sanctions eased.
Friday's gathering in Beijing comes after two rounds of preliminary nuclear talks between Iranian and European diplomats in Geneva in recent months.
It will bring together three key members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, an alliance formed to promote Eurasian economic security. It underscores the stronger ties that have developed between Iran and Russia during Trump's absence from the White House.
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The Beijing meeting also raises questions over the extent to which Russia can influence the US president's demands for a much broader deal with Iran - including curbing its ballistic-missile activities and support for proxy militias in the Middle East - which is at odds with Moscow's view.
Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday said Moscow wants to return to the original format of the nuclear deal that Trump jettisoned in 2018. Any US bid to widen its scope were worrying and unrealistic, Lavrov said.
"There are some indications that the Americans would like this new deal to be accompanied by political conditions, insisting that there should be some verifiable arrangement for Iran not to support groups in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Syria, anywhere, which I don't think is going to fly," Lavrov said, according to comments published on Russia's Foreign Ministry website.
The IAEA, the UN's nuclear watchdog, has urged the US and Iran to settle their differences and avoid further escalations in tensions.
After Trump abandoned the Obama-era nuclear accord with Iran, he started a so-called maximum-pressure policy against Tehran. That triggered an economic crisis in the Islamic Republic, with inflation accelerating and the currency plunging, and raised fears of a war between the two countries.
Those concerns have heightened over the past year after Iran twice fired missiles at key US ally Israel. Israel has threatened to strike Iran's nuclear sites, a move it would probably need to coordinate with the US to ensure it's successful.
(COMMENT, BELOW)