Russia says it's worried about threat of new strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities
Israel and the United States bombed Iranian nuclear sites in June with the stated aim of preventing Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Iran denies any such intention.
"Regular threats towards Iran to launch new missile and bomb strikes on its nuclear facilities cannot but cause serious concern. The cynicism of such statements is added by the fact that they are made under the guise of imaginary concern for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told reporters.
"Bombing nuclear facilities should not become commonplace, routine international practice. The catastrophic risks associated with this cannot be ignored, much less justified."
Russia has cultivated closer ties with Iran since the start of its war in Ukraine, and this year signed a strategic partnership treaty with the Islamic Republic.
Zakharova said a sustainable peace settlement and a promise not to conduct new strikes on Iran were prerequisites for normalising cooperation between Tehran and the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
41 minutes ago
- The Guardian
The US attacks on Iran have backfired horribly – but a path to peace is still possible
Hanging is the preferred method of execution in Iran, although stoning and crucifixion offer alternative options for an ever-vengeful theocracy. Death by hanging is not necessarily quick. Strangulation and suffocation can take several minutes. The UN says more than 600 people have been judicially murdered so far this year. Iran has more executions per capita than any country in the world. Since June's US and Israeli attacks, growing numbers of victims are political dissidents. Fifty days on, nothing remotely positive has resulted from the illegal bombing raids and missile strikes mounted by the US president, Donald Trump, and Israel's leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, despite their boasts of world-changing success. Iran's nuclear facilities were not obliterated, as Trump claimed. Tehran has not abandoned uranium enrichment. The regime did not fall, despite Netanyahu's call for an uprising. If anything, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is more defiant. He has since launched a new crackdown on opponents, hence the executions. Deploring last weekend's hanging of political prisoners Behrouz Ehsani and Mehdi Hassani, Amnesty International linked their fate to the US-Israeli attacks. Arrested in 2022, the two men were charged with rebellion and 'enmity against God'. They were tortured, forced to sign confessions and sentenced last year after a five-minute trial. The decision to execute them now 'highlights the authorities' ruthless use of the death penalty as a tool of political repression in times of national crisis to crush dissent and spread fear', Amnesty said. Hundreds have been arrested since June in a regime drive to unmask spies and collaborators, real or imagined. Glaring intelligence failures that, for example, allowed Israel to locate and bomb a national security council meeting, injuring Iran's president, Masoud Pezeshkian, are officially blamed not on gross incompetence but supposed fifth columnists. Iran's parliament wants to expand use of capital punishment. Up to 60 political prisoners face execution. This typically harsh reaction by clerical hardliners around Khamenei, and within the judiciary and Revolutionary Guards, comes despite a surge in patriotic sentiment after the attacks, which reportedly killed at least 935 people, mostly civilians, and injured more than 5,000. By intensifying repression, the regime squandered a chance to harness public anger, not least against Britain and European governments that turned a blind eye. US-Israeli actions have had other far-reaching, negative consequences. The attacks breached the UN charter and international law, as the Brics group of 'global south' countries noted. They led Tehran to suspend UN nuclear inspections. They exacerbated US-Europe divisions. And, ironically, they increased the likelihood of Iran building a bomb for self-defence. Iran insists it does not possess and does not want nuclear weapons. For all Israel's vaunted intelligence capabilities, neither Netanyahu nor anyone else has definitively proved otherwise. The decision to attack was based on a guess, driven by fear and hatred. It caused serious physical damage, but did not change mindsets. Iran is adamant it will continue to enrich uranium for civilian purposes. The bombing was a bust. Trump's angry threat to strike again is confirmation of failure. What this reckless act of aggression did do is encourage rogue states such as Russia to believe they, too, may attack other countries with impunity. It reinforces the belief in Iranian ruling circles, and not only among rejectionist factions, that the west cannot be trusted and a closer alliance with China is necessary. It strengthens the hand of hardliners whose fondness for regional proxy warfare, and recently documented covert operations against Britain, has entrenched Iran's pariah status. Historically speaking, Iran was and is an avoidable tragedy – one of the west's worst-ever geostrategic own goals. Unthinking support for the shah helped spur the 1979 revolution. The subsequent, far from inevitable ascendancy of conservative clerics plus abiding, irrational US animosity, feeding off memories of the humiliating Tehran embassy siege, rendered the rift permanent. Europe tried and failed to chart a middle path. In 2018, Trump reneged on the US-, UN- and EU-ratified nuclear deal with Tehran and reimposed sanctions. This last of many disastrous policy mistakes led directly to today's impasse. With wiser heads, it could have been very different. All parties to this conflict should study the French Enlightenment philosopher Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, a foe to tyranny in all its forms. Writing in his 1721 bestseller Persian Letters more than 300 years ago, he issues an impressively prescient warning about what were then imaginary weapons of mass destruction. 'You say that you are afraid of the discovery of some method of destruction that is crueller than those which are used now,' his fictitious Persian traveller Usbek writes to a friend. 'If such a fateful invention came to be discovered, it would soon be banned by international law. By the unanimous consent of every country the discovery would be buried.' In the sense that nuclear weapons are outlawed, Usbek's optimistic prediction was correct. But not 'every country' complies. If the US and Israel are sincere about preventing Iran acquiring the bomb, they should set an example and reduce, and ultimately eliminate, their nuclear arsenals. They should stop threatening renewed attacks. And they should back talks on a regional nuclear pact, as proposed by Iran's former foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Only then, perhaps, will Tehran come in from the cold. Only then, perhaps, will its paranoid leaders stop hanging innocent people. Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator
BBC News
41 minutes ago
- BBC News
Ukraine and Russia strikes hit homes and oil depot near Black Sea
A Russian missile strike has destroyed homes and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine's southern city of Mykolaiv, local officials least three civilians were reported injured in the city near the Black Sea, which has been repeatedly shelled by Russian forces. Ukraine's State Emergency Service posted photos of firefighters at the scene after the missile on Sunday a massive oil depot fire was raging near Russia's Black Sea resort of Sochi - blamed by the Russian authorities on a Ukrainian drone attack. Sochi's airport in the same area - Adler district - suspended Region Governor Veniamin Kondratyev said on Telegram that drone debris had hit a fuel tank, and 127 firefighters were tackling the blaze. The drone attack was one of several launched by Ukraine over the weekend, targeting installations in the southern Russian cities of Ryazan, Penza and Voronezh. The governor of Voronezh said four people were injured in one drone President Volodymyr Zelensky called for stronger international sanctions on Russia this week after a deadly attack on Kyiv on Thursday killed at least 31 than 300 drones and eight cruise missiles were launched in the assault, Ukrainian officials said, making the attack one of the deadliest on the capital since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
The National
2 hours ago
- The National
Keir Starmer's Palestine recognition speech full of colonial arrogance
This week, three-quarters of a century later, the British Prime Minister affirmed the enduring truth of Sayegh's words. In the same breath that Keir Starmer declared statehood to be the inalienable right of the Palestinian people, he confirmed that British recognition will hinge on the actions of the Israeli state: Only if Benjamin Netanyahu and his government continue their campaign of ethnic cleansing will Britain join 147 other countries in recognising [[Palestine]] as a sovereign nation. Speaking in front of two large Union Jacks, the Prime Minister acted with the same colonial arrogance that motivated the British colonisation of Palestine in the early 20th century. Justifying that occupation before the Peel Commission in 1937, Winston Churchill said: 'I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time … I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.' READ MORE: Police remove pro-Palestine protesters from John Swinney's Edinburgh Fringe show Keir Starmer would never say such things. However, for as long as Britain uses Palestinian statehood as a bargaining chip and simultaneously supplies material aid to abet Israel's crimes, the Prime Minister channels Churchill's imperial logic: Dehumanise the Palestinians in order to justify the denial of their right to self-determination. In Gassan Kanafani's novella, Returning To Haifa, Said, the protagonist, asks his wife, Safiyya: 'Do you know what homeland is? It is where nothing like this happens.' Since October 2023, the Palestinian homeland has been decimated – 70,000 tonnes of explosives have been dropped on the Gaza Strip; 4000 buildings have been demolished in the Occupied West Bank. The conditions necessary for human habitation of that homeland have been systematically erased too. Gaza, the UN acknowledges, is now 'the hungriest place on earth'. As the direct consequence of intentional decisions by a nuclear power, the mass starvation of Gaza is, as Professor Adam Tooze points out, 'quite unlike that anywhere else in the world'. In Yemen, Sudan and Haiti – among the places where hunger is most acute – the share of the population at risk is between 49% and 57%. In Gaza, the share is 100%. The declared objective of Israel's genocide is to deny the Palestinian people even the hope of a homeland. Last week, the British state served that aim, conferring the right to decide Palestine's future not to the land's people, but to its illegal occupier. Deploying the language of universal human rights to strip the Palestinian people of their agency, Keir Starmer's duplicitous designs offer Benjamin Netanyahu an olive branch. By delaying any decision regarding recognition until the UN General Assembly meets in September, the British government has afforded the Israeli government six more weeks of impunity. Keir Starmer will only recognise Palestine as a last-ditch attempt to salvage what little faith remains in the 'rules-based international order'. To do so would involve committing the cardinal sin of humanising a population whose erasure the British state has licensed, supported and participated in for decades. If the British state is to concede that Palestinians, like the rest of the world, have the right to self-determination, then Keir Starmer and his Cabinet have a series of uncomfortable questions to answer. To this day, imperialism's serial dispossession of the Palestinians has rested on the explicit understanding that they do not enjoy the same rights as the rest of us. The question of recognition – and Keir Starmer's attitude to it – forces this contradiction to the surface for all to see. Since last year's General Election, the question of Palestine has posed serious challenges to the Labour leader's premiership. Confronted by a mass movement to end Israel's genocide, the Prime Minister has taken every possible step to evade accountability – including the criminalisation of peaceful protest. Last week's announcement is no different. The foreign policy of the British state – which has conducted more surveillance flights over Gaza than even Israel – is not, as far as our government is concerned, up for debate. Indeed, Britain's subjugation to the United States is such that the interests of imperialism have always sat outside the realms of our democracy. By cynically gesturing toward recognising the Palestinian state, Keir Starmer hopes to ease popular domestic pressure while not straying from the broad position of the Trump administration. The Palestine solidarity movement can have no truck with such colonial parlour games.
