DUBAI, February 25. /TASS/. Tehran has refused to hold talks with Washington because it does not want the US to enforce its conditions, like what is now happening with Ukraine, Head of the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences, former member of Iran’s parliament Mohammad-Javad Larijani said.
"The statements saying that we will certainly have a war if we do not negotiate with the US are groundless. <…> We must understand that the US administration will not lift the sanctions through negotiations but instead will make demands going against our sovereignty and freedom, which we will have to accept in exchange for lifting the restrictions. This is exactly what it [the US administration] is doing with Ukraine now," he said in an interview with the ILNA agency.
According to the expert, Iran’s goal is to reduce the influence of sanctions to the point that Washington itself realizes how useless they are.
On February 7, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that talks with the US were out of the question given its past deception: Washington signed a nuclear deal in 2015, failed to comply with it, kept anti-Iranian sanctions in place, and unilaterally terminated the agreement in 2018.
In early February, US President Donald Trump said that Washington was interested in obtaining rare-earth metals from Ukraine. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave Vladimir Zelensky the proposed mineral extraction deal on February 12. Zelensky did not sign the agreement either during his meeting with Bessent or later in Munich at a meeting with US Vice President JD Vance, even though he previously indicated he was willing to do so.
Zelensky insisted that the proposed deal lacked security guarantees for Ukraine. On February 21, however, US national security adviser Mike Waltz said that Zelensky would sign the agreement with Washington in the near future. After that, sources in Zelensky’s office told the Ukrainian media that the document had yet to be finalized, while Zelensky himself said at a press conference on February 23 that he "does not want to sign" the agreement with the US because it would supposedly burden ten generations of Ukrainians with debt.