Russia’s representative at Saturday’s meeting, Sergey Ryabkov, summed up the session. “We talked mostly about the second track [sanctions], but it doesn’t mean we should abandon the first one. It [the meeting] was inconclusive in the sense that we didn’t make any decisions right away.”
The United States, Britain, France and Germany all want the UN Security Council to impose a fourth round of sanctions, though it isn’t clear if they all agree on what those sanctions should be. French officials have complained that the Americans have gone soft and are proposing very weak sanctions, not the tough ones Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke of for months. (See last week’s Iran Times, page two.)
Russia appears divided and uncertain with different officials saying different things.
China has in recent weeks been vocally critical of sanctions. It only sent a low level official to the meeting that was otherwise attended by high-ranking professional diplomats. Several who attended said China’s representative was firm in saying that China opposed further sanctions “at the moment,” but carefully did not rule out sanctions as a matter of policy. China opposed all three of the previous rounds of sanctions before reversing itself and voting for them in the Security Council.
Robert Cooper, the representative of the EU who chaired the two-hour meeting, told reporters afterward that all six agreed “that Iran has failed to follow up” on the October proposal for exchanging uranium to fuel the small Tehran reactor, “in particular by refusing further meetings to discuss the nuclear issue.” The Islamic Republic has for several weeks told its people that the Big Six have refused Iranian proposals to meet and discuss the issue.
In Tehran, Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehman-Parast said Sunday that the failure of the Big Six to reach agreement was perfectly predictable. He also said all of the six were fully aware that Iran has never diverted any nuclear material. But no one has ever accused Iran of diverting nuclear material and that is not an issue in dispute.