The Foreign Ministry says a meeting of the Caspian Sea coastal states earlier this month resolved every outstanding issue on the status of the sea but one and an agreement on the Caspian is close at hand after a quarter-century of dispute. But the one outstanding issue is how to draw the lines divvying up the sea among its five coastal states. And that has been the problem ever since 1991, when the USSR collapsed and the status of the sea became an open question. Iran has always wanted to divide the sea’s waters into five equal parts, with each country getting 20 percent. No one else supports that. The others prefer the more standard approach of using a “modified median line,” which would give Kazakhstan 30 percent, Russia 20 percent, Azerbaijan 20 percent, Turkmenistan 17 percent and Iran 13 percent. More important than the percentages, the line Iran wants would deprive Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan of some known oilfields.