"U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said after talks with Russia's foreign minister on Tuesday that neither country is seeking to impose sanctions against Iran under the current circumstances.
Clinton said sanctions over Iran’s controversial uranium enrichment program would be premature, and that Russia was being “extremely cooperative in the work we have done together” on the issue.
Lavrov said Russia is “in principle very reserved on sanctions, as they rarely produce results.” He said sanctions should only be used when all diplomatic means have been exhausted, and that “in the situation with Iran, this is far from the case.”
Lavrov also said the U.S. and Russia had identical positions on the issue.
“We are not asking anything of each other on Iran, because it would be ridiculous to make requests on an issue where our positions coincide,” he said.
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, again, with respect to Iran, we had a lengthy conversation. We reviewed the outcome of the October 1st meeting. The United States has always had a dual-track approach to Iran where we made it clear we wanted to pursue the engagement and diplomatic track. And the very strong, united approach that has been taken in the P-5+1 which, of course, includes the United States and Russia, we think is making an impact on Iran. Iran has several obligations that it said it would fulfill. We believe it is important to pursue the diplomatic track and to do everything we can to make it successful.
We believe that Iran is entitled to peaceful nuclear energy, but that it is not entitled to nuclear weapons. Russia agrees with us on that. At the same time that we are very vigorously pursuing this track, we are aware that we might not be as successful as we need to be. So we have always looked at the potential of sanctions in the event that we are not successful, that we cannot assure ourselves and others that Iran has decided not to pursue nuclear weapons.
I think what President Medvedev said was that they may be inevitable, not that they are inevitable. He said that they’re not always preferable, but they may be inevitable. But we are not at that point yet. That is not a conclusion we have reached, and we want to be very clear that it is our preference that Iran work with the international community, as represented by the P-5+1, fulfill its obligation on inspections, in fact, open up its entire system so that there can be no doubt about what they’re doing, and comply with the agreement in principle to transfer out the low-enriched uranium. Those would be confidence-building measures, and that would give us an opportunity to take stock of where we are on the diplomatic track......."
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