Most comments by Russian officials in recent weeks have focused on Russia’s opposition to sanctions and on the lack of courtroom quality evidence that Iran’s nuclear program has a military side.
But Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov took a much more balanced approach in an interview last week with Indeks Bezopasnosti (Security Index). He seemed eager to position Russia in the middle between two feuding parties without taking the side of either.
He criticized sanctions and argued that the West was pursuing a policy whose harshness would make Iran dig in its heels and become recalcitrant.
But he criticized Iran’s nuclear program and the country’s minimal cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). And he said Iran was failing to provide the world with evidence that its program does not have a military dimension.
He said both the West and Iran must be willing to compromise if there is ever to be a way out of the current predicament.
“It is true that Iran is advancing its nuclear program,” Ryabkov said. “It is true that Iran has limited its cooperation with the IAEA to commitments that are prescribed under its agreement on guarantees with the IAEA.
“For Russia, this is probably an even more alarming situation than for many other countries,” he said.
“We are in the immediate vicinity of Iran, and an Iran with nuclear weapons is not an option for Russia,” Ryabkov said.
“At the same time, we have to admit that the policy being pursued by Tehran these days offers no sound and unquestionable evidence that the Iranian nuclear program has no military dimension,” he said.
He argued that sanctions against Iran would not work and that “there is an alternative” to them.
“The alternative is a serious negotiation process with Iran—serious in the sense that those involved in such a dialogue should have a serious intention to look for compromises and to propose a solution formula that would interest Iran,” he said.
“Essentially, the entire issue of the Iranian nuclear program and discussions of it with the international community amount to the question of who will take the first step, who will make concessions, who will lose face and who won’t,” Ryabkov said.
“It seems to me that this is wrong. If responsible politicians are in earnest about the situation and don’t want it to degenerate into a new crisis, possibly an armed crisis, they should honestly tell themselves that they must show courage and make proper decisions,” he said.
“Representatives of the Russian Federation have brought this logic and this ideology in practically the same wording to the attention of our partners in the ‘three plus three’ group [the five permanent member states of the UN Security Council and Germany] and our Iranian partners, which whom we are maintaining a very busy dialogue and will continue it,” Ryabkov said.
“We believe that we have not worked hard enough over all these years in termsof real political investment in the dialogue and in the efforts to get Iran look for compromises,” Ryabkov said.
He admitted, however, that Iran often behaves less than constructively as well.
“Iranian diplomacy and Iranian policymakers holding negotiations or dialogue with the international community regarding their nuclear program are acting in a manner that has been practiced in Iranian markets for decades. This means that, when bargaining is under way over something, especially an expensive thing, like a wonderful carpet, whose production has taken a lot of years of work and great talent of weavers, bargaining begins with figures having nothing to do with reality,” Ryabkov said.
But then, if they see that the buyer is not just walking around the market but actually wants to buy this carpet, then serious bargaining starts. But they will never give up this carpet for free, and they will surely not give up this carpet if the buyer takes a stick or, what is worse, a gun out of his pocket,” he added.
One of the problems is that Iran is losing interest in the negotiations, he said.
“It is also a fact that, along with progress in the development of its nuclear program, Iran is gradually losing interest in discussing options of deals that imply that, in exchange for some steps toward reducing and suspending some components of its nuclear program, Iran would obtain only some cosmetic improvements in its situation,” he said.
“That is, the price for the carpet from which a serious conversation could begin is unfortunately growing. But the buyer still has some money. And we have tried to calculate this money in somebody else’s pocket,” he said.