The UN Security Council on Friday rejected another last-ditch effort to delay the reimposition of sanctions on Iran over its nuclear programme a day before the deadline and after Western countries claimed that weeks of meetings failed to result in a “concrete” agreement.
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The resolution put forth by Russia and China – Iran’s most powerful and closest allies on the 15-member council – failed to garner support from the nine countries required to halt the series of UN sanctions from taking effect on Saturday, as outlined in Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
Barring an eleventh-hour deal, the reinstatement of sanctions – triggered by Britain, France and Germany – will once again freeze Iranian assets abroad, halt arms deals with Tehran and penalise any development of Iran’s ballistic missile programme, among other measures. That will further squeeze the country’s reeling economy.
The move is expected to heighten already magnified tensions between Iran and the West. It is unclear how Iran will respond, given that in the past, officials have threatened to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, potentially following North Korea, which abandoned the treaty in 2003 and then built atomic weapons.
Four countries – China, Russia, Pakistan and Algeria – once again supported giving Iran more time to negotiate with the European countries, known as the E3, and the United States, which unilaterally withdrew from the accord with world powers in 2018.
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“We had hoped that European colleagues and the US would think twice, and they would opt for the path of diplomacy and dialogue instead of their clumsy blackmail, which merely results in escalation of the situation in the region,” Dmitry Polyanskiy, the deputy Russian ambassador to the UN, said during the meeting.