MOSCOW, March 6. /TASS/. During recent talks with Washington, Tehran confirmed that it does not want to possess nuclear arms. Moreover, Iran proposed various options for resolving disagreements on the nuclear issue, the Islamic Republic’s Ambassador to Russia, Kazem Jalali, said in an interview with the RBC TV.
"We believe the negotiations proceeded quite well. We wanted to preserve the peaceful nuclear program of an industrial nature; even the Americans did not object to this. Regarding nuclear weapons, we were completely against it and stated that we did not want to possess nuclear arms. We even proposed various options for resolving this issue," the diplomat said.
All issues were solvable, the ambassador believes. "We believe there were no closed issues during the negotiation process, nothing of the sort. Even they [the US] agreed to uranium enrichment within Iran," he added.
Jalali also noted that the US "from the very beginning decided to mislead everyone; and nothing else." "We understand that the Americans don’t believe in negotiations, and negotiations are merely a means of deception to achieve other goals," the diplomat stated.
The United States and Israel launched a large-scale military operation against Iran on February 28. Major Iranian cities, including Tehran, were struck. The White House justified the attack by citing alleged missile and nuclear threats from Iran. At the same time, US leadership openly called on the Iranian population to rise up against their government and seize power. As a result of the strikes, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and several other senior figures in the leadership of the Islamic Republic were killed. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced a retaliatory operation, targeting sites in Israel. US military bases in Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia were also hit.