LONDON, 5 June 2003 — British Prime Minister Tony Blair said yesterday that Russia had pledged at a G-8 meeting in France to suspend exports of nuclear fuel to Iran until Tehran met demands of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Blair said the Group of Eight industrialized countries “emphasized the proliferation implications of Iran’s advanced nuclear program and called on Iran to sign and implement an IAEA additional protocol without delay and without conditions.” Russian President Vladimir Putin “made clear that in the meantime Russia would suspend its exports of nuclear fuel to Iran,” Blair told Parliament in his report on the Evian summit. “These are important steps to halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons,” he said.
At the close of the summit on Tuesday, Putin said Russia would continue building a nuclear power station for Iran, but insisted Tehran’s nuclear program had to come under stricter international control.
Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, speaking after meeting NATO ministers in Madrid yesterday, said Russia’s support for the $800 million Bushehr power station project was “in accordance with our international undertakings”. Iran has yet to sign an additional protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it signed in 1970, which would allow IAEA inspections at short notice. “We have expressed our view to our Iranian partners and we’ve called on them to sign up to the IAEA supplementary protocol,” Ivanov told a news conference. “We believe that if they do that and IAEA inspection functions are expanded in relation to the Iranian nuclear program, we think that would serve to greatly reduce the concerns that...countries have expressed.”
