Putin arrived in Tehran on Monday for talks with supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani, with the Syrian conflict expected to be high on the agenda.
Advertisement
GECF members account for 42 percent of global gas output, 70 percent of global gas reserve, 40 percent of piped gas transfer, and 65 percent of global trade of Liquefied Natural Gas.
Since the announcement of the deal, however, Russian Federation has wasted no time in re-energizing relations, declaring immediately that it would unfreeze a contract to supply Iran with advanced anti-aircraft missiles, which the USA fears could prevent a military strike against Iran’s nuclear sites.
Russian Federation is also emerging as a long-term arms partner for Iran, despite the countries having a complicated history over territory, oil, commerce and communism.
“We expect that after sanctions are lifted Iran will prefer to work with the Russian Federation on many tracks especially in hi-tech areas such as aviation, aerospace, radio electronics, shipbuilding”, Russian Deputy Premier Dmitry Rogozin said. Israel and many U.S. politicians are staunchly opposed to the deal on lifting sanctions.
Russian Federation and Iran earlier signed a contract for Moscow to supply Tehran with S-300 surface-to-air missile systems. The Syrian crisis was in fact the main topic discussed by Khamenei and Putin in their two-hour meeting, during which the Supreme Leader hailed Russia’s effective role in Syria.
The news agency Interfax cited a Kremlin spokesperson on Monday as saying that Putin and Iran’s Khamenei agreed political decisions should not be imposed on Syria from outside.
In this meeting which lasted approximately two hours, the Leader of the Islamic Revolution described Mr. Putin as an outstanding personality in today’s world and expressed his thanks for the Russian efforts on the nuclear issue.
But Russia and the West remain at loggerheads over the fate of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Still, he noted “the problem has been in their initial military incursion into Syria, they have been more focused on propping up President Assad”. Moscow, however, later provided Saddam Hussein with weapons during the Iran-Iraq war.
But Moscow’s aim of an worldwide coalition made up of Iran, Jordan and other regional and Western countries against ISIS is coming up against deadlock over Assad’s future, which recent peace talks in Vienna failed to break.
Advertisement
The visit is itself a sign of the countries moving closer together now that the nuclear deal has been signed: this is Putin’s first visit to Tehran since 2007.
