The government of Russia confirmed on Wednesday that it would entirely disregard United Nations “snapback” sanctions on Iran reimposed this week after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) ruled Iran in violation of international laws governing nuclear development.
Russia’s U.N. Ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, said that the other members of the countries signing onto the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or 2015 Iran nuclear deal, who agreed to the snapback sanctions and the Russian government would simply be living in “two parallel realities” and offered no suggestions for resolving the disconnect.
“We do not recognize the snapback as coming into force,” Reuters quoted Nebenzia as saying on Wednesday. “We’ll be living in two parallel realities, because for some snapback happened, for us it didn’t. That creates a problem. How we will get out of it — let’s see.”
The envoy condemned the return of sanctions as a “major escalation around Iran” and expressed concern that the sanctions could result in a situation where Iran’s entire nuclear program would no longer exist.
Iran insists that it has invested heavily in nuclear development for only peaceful means, but developed a prodigious capacity for enriching uranium in the past decade, enriching more material than is necessary for any known civilian use. As the Iranian Islamist regime regularly calls for “death to Israel” and “death to America,” the targeted countries, their allies, and United Nations officials have all expressed concerns that Tehran poses a nuclear weapons threat to the world. Iranian officials dismiss these concerns by claiming that “supreme leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei signed a “fatwa,” or religious edict, against nuclear weapons, but no evidence of such as “fatwa” exists.
Iran’s Mehr News Agency, which excitedly reported Nebenzia’s comments, also described the Russian ambassador as condemning United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for allegedly having “rushed to implement a legally flawed resolution regarding the reinstatement of Security Council sanctions on Iran.” In reality, the Security Council sanctions are a result of research and declarations from the IAEA, which is part of the United Nations network of agencies but is separately run by its director-general, Rafael Grossi.
Grossi has spent much of the past year expressing frustration and alarm at Iran’s nuclear program. He has also condemned the JCPOA, which dates back to the administration of former President Barack Obama, as functionally useless.
“Nobody applies it, nobody follows it,” Grossi said in June 2024, declaring that the JCPOA “exists only on paper and means nothing.”
A year later, Grossi testified before the board of the IAEA that Iran was actively preventing the agency from doing its job, making it impossible for him to confirm whether Iran was abiding by international law or not.
“Unfortunately, Iran has repeatedly either not answered, or not provided technically credible answers to, the Agency’s questions. It has also sought to sanitize the locations, which has impeded Agency verification activities,” Grossi asserted. Due to the lack of access, he concluded that Iran was using secret sites as “part of an undeclared structured nuclear program carried out by Iran until the early 2000s and that some activities used undeclared nuclear material.”
For the first time in 20 years, the IAEA declared Iran in breach of international law shortly after Grossi’s testimony. European leaders began the process to reinstate the pre-JCPOA sanctions on Iran in August; the sanctions formally came into force this week.
The JCPOA was originally signed by the five permanent members of the Security Council – China, Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France – and Germany. The United States, under President Donald Trump, withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018, arguing that Iran routinely violated the agreement, rendering it non-functional.
The U.K., Germany, and France triggered the snapback sanctions. The snapback sanctions ban certain members of the Iranian regime from entering countries and freezes their foreign assets. They also ban exporting weapons to Iran, as well as any materials that could be used to expand Iran’s uranium enrichment program.
Reports in August indicated that Russia was preparing a draft Security Council resolution to prevent the return of the “snapback” sanctions. Russia’s First Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Dmitry Polyanski, confirmed those reports, stating that both Moscow and Beijing were looking to “give more breathing space for diplomacy” by blocking the sanctions. These efforts appeared to fail, however, leaving Russia to simply ignore international law.
Iran has ominously threatened a “reciprocal response” against any country that abides by the Security Council sanctions, without elaborating.
Iran and Russia share a deep political alliance. The two are members of the anti-American coalition BRICS and recently signed a new “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” in January intended to promote expanded trade, diplomatic cooperation, and defense support. The partnership went into effect on Thursday.
The deal, the Russian Foreign Ministry celebrated on Thursday, “reflects the strategic choice made by the political leadership of Russia and Iran toward enhancing the friendly and good neighborly bilateral relations which serve the two countries’ core interests.”
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