UN Security Council rejects effort to delay sanctions on Iran

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. Security Council on Friday rejected another last-ditch effort to delay the reimposition of sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program a day before the deadline and after Western countries claimed that weeks of meetings failed to result in a “concrete” agreement.

The resolution put forth by Russia and China — Iran’s most powerful and closest allies on the 15-member council — failed to garner support from the nine countries required to halt the series of U.N. sanctions from taking effect Saturday, as outlined in Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.

“We had hoped that European colleagues and the U.S. would think twice, and they would opt for the path of diplomacy and dialogue instead of their clumsy blackmail, which merely results in escalation of the situation in the region,” Dmitry Polyanskiy, the deputy Russian ambassador to the U.N., said during the meeting.

Barring an eleventh-hour deal, the reinstatement of sanctions — triggered by Britain, France and Germany — will once again freeze Iranian assets abroad, halt arms deals with Tehran and penalize any development of Iran’s ballistic missile program, among other measures. That will further squeeze the country’s reeling economy. In an interview Friday afternoon, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian called the decision “unfair, unjust and illegal.”

The move is expected to heighten already magnified tensions between Iran and the West. But despite previous threats to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Pezeshkian said in an interview with a group of reporters that the country had no intention to do so right now. North Korea, which abandoned the treaty in 2003, went on to build atomic weapons.

Four countries — China, Russia, Pakistan and Algeria — once again supported giving Iran more time to negotiate with the European countries, known as the E3, and the United States, which unilaterally withdrew from the accord with world powers in 2018.

“The U.S has betrayed diplomacy, but it is the E3 which have buried it,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said after the vote. “This sordid mess did not come about overnight. Both the E3 and the U.S. have consistently misrepresented Iran’s peaceful nuclear program.”

The European leaders triggered the so-called “snapback” mechanism last month after accusing Tehran of failing to comply with the conditions of the accord and when weeks of high-level negotiations failed to reach a diplomatic resolution.