Page 9 - IRANRptSep22

2.2 Iran delivers Ukraine ‘peace initiative’ to Russia from unnamed European leader
Iran on August 31 claimed to have delivered a “peace initiative” for ending the Ukraine war to Russia. The proposal was said to have come from an unnamed European leader.
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian announced the handing over of the initiative while standing next to Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov during a news conference in Moscow. The proposal, he said, was originally given to Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi. Iran’s semi-official ISNA news agency earlier on August 31 said that it was French President Emmanuel Macron who channelled the peace move via Tehran. However, no officials have commented on whether that was the case.
While Iran has several times called for the fighting in Ukraine to be stopped through dialogue, it has not condemned Russia for invading Ukraine and has accused Nato of provoking a situation that turned into an armed conflict by pushing forward with its expansion plans.
Since the war began, Moscow, under an unprecedented hail of sanctions from the West, has turned to Iran to build up alternative trade and investment, open up new export routes for the shipping of Russian goods and provide military assistance in the form of combat drones. Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Tehran in July, where he met Raisi, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and also Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Analysts, meanwhile, continue to puzzle over what the reinstatement of the 2015 nuclear deal, or JCPOA, between Iran and the major powers would mean for the Russia-Iran relationship. For the past year, Iran has remained difficult to please when it comes to exactly what it wants to see in a drafted new version of the deal to persuade it to come back into the agreement. However, there are growing reports of soundings taken in Iran that indicate officials have concluded that they need a revived JCPOA to help address economic stress among Iranians that by now is causing street protests on an almost daily basis.
If Iran signed up for a restored nuclear deal, and the Biden administration also moved to take the US back into the agreement, in return for the curbing of the Iranian nuclear development programme, economic sanctions on Tehran would be lifted and, given its huge oil and gas reserves, Iran could substantially increase its energy shipments to help address the growing energy crisis much caused by Russia squeezing its energy supplies to the West.
Energy analysts have already detected some tensions between Tehran and Moscow, with the latter partly responding to Western sanctions by selling an increasing amount of discounted oil to China—an important ‘under the radar’ market for Iran, which given existing US sanctions, must struggle undetected to find buyers willing to purchase its oil.
Despite the risk of Iran becoming something of an unlikely energy saviour for the West amid the Kremlin-provoked energy crisis, Russia remains publicly supportive of bringing back the JCPOA.
9 IRAN Country Report September 2022 www.intellinews.com