MOSCOW. Feb 16 (Interfax) - Moscow believes that the six powers (the five permanent UN Security Council members and Germany) involved in negotiations with Iran to make sure that its nuclear program is purely civilian are not active enough to attain this goal.
"We believe that we have not worked hard enough over all these years in terms of real political investment in the dialogue and in the efforts to get Iran look for compromises," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said in an interview with the publication Security Index.
He admitted, however, that Iran often behaves less than constructively as well.
"Iranian diplomacy and Iranian policymakers holding negotiations or dialogue with the international community regarding their nuclear program are acting in a manner that has been practiced in Iranian markets for decades. This means that, when bargaining is under way over something, especially an expensive thing, like a wonderful carpet, whose production has taken a lot of years of work and great talent of weavers, bargaining begins with figures having nothing to do with reality," Ryabkov said.
"But then, if they see that the buyer is not just walking around the market but actually wants to buy this carpet, then serious bargaining starts. But they will never give up this carpet for free, and they will surely not give up this carpet if the buyer takes a stick or, what is worse, a gun out of his pocket," he added.
One of the problems is that Iran is losing interest in the negotiations, he said.
"It is also a fact that, along with progress in the development of its nuclear program, Iran is gradually losing interest in discussing options of deals that imply that, in exchange for some steps toward reducing and suspending some components of its nuclear program, Iran would obtain only some cosmetic improvements in its situation," he said.
"That is, the price for the carpet from which a serious conversation could begin is unfortunately growing. But the buyer still has some money. And we have tried to calculate this money in somebody else's pocket by drafting the well-known Lavrov Plan," he said.
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