Putin agrees to help Trump broker nuclear talks with Iran

US President Donald Trump with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin (Courtesy: Reuters photo)

Russia agreed to assist US President Donald Trump’s administration in communicating with Iran on issues including the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program and its support for regional anti-US proxies, according to people familiar with the situation.

Trump relayed that interest directly to President Vladimir Putin in a phone call in February and top officials from his administration discussed the matter with their Russian counterparts at talks in Saudi Arabia days later, people said, declining to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Discussions are in their initial stages and it’s not clear whether any talks between the US and Iran would yield any progress. White House officials did not respond to requests for comment. Neither Russia nor Iran have publicly confirmed or denied the request.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in response to questions sent by Bloomberg that “Russia believes that the United States and Iran should resolve all problems through negotiations” and that Moscow “is ready to do everything in its power to achieve this.”

A spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, when asked if Russia had offered to mediate between Tehran and Washington, said it was “natural” for countries to offer their assistance.

“Given the significance of these matters, it’s possible that many parties will show goodwill and readiness to help with various problems,” the spokesman, Esmaeil Baghaei, said during a televised press conference Monday in Tehran. The ministry didn’t respond to questions from Bloomberg News.

Since taking office about six weeks ago, Trump has tried to restore relations with Putin, which the US severed after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As Trump seeks to broker an end to that war directly with Putin — including a February 12 phone call between the two leaders — both sides have signaled they’re open to cooperating on other geopolitical interests, including trade routes and resources in the Arctic.

Top US and Russian officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, discussed Washington’s interest in Moscow helping with Iranian issues during a February 18 meeting in Riyadh, according to people with knowledge of the situation, asking not to be identified as not all details of those talks have been made public.

Russia’s Lavrov later shared details about the US meeting with his Iranian counterpart Abbas Araghchi when they met in Tehran, Araghchi said in a televised press conference after the meeting.

The US has long suspected the Islamic Republic of using a decades-old civilian nuclear program to shield a covert military dimension. Iran has repeatedly denied it wants weapons and insists its atomic work is for peaceful means including power stations that are partly financed by Russia.

Iran and the US agreed a landmark nuclear deal in 2015 during the administration of President Barak Obama. Brokered by the EU and also involving China and Russia, it imposed strict limits on Iran’s atomic activities in exchange for sanctions relief. Trump abandoned it during his first term, setting off an economic crisis in the Islamic Republic.

Since returning to the White House, Trump has sent mixed signals about Iran. He said he wants to revive his first-term “maximum pressure” policy of tough sanctions that also targeted Iranian security forces, including killing a top general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But he’s also said he wants to “immediately” start working on a “verified nuclear peace agreement with Iran.”

Russia and Iran — both heavily sanctioned by the US — have also significantly deepened cooperation on trade and energy since the start of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Iran is also supplying drones to Russia, which it’s used in the war.

“Both the United States and Iran are trying to find channels of communication, productive ones which would mark the start of a dialogue,” said Nikolay Kozhanov, an associate professor at Qatar University’s Gulf Studies Center.

Any agreement between the US and Iran would be a “complex” one with the US offering sanctions relief and Iran agreeing to contain its regional ambitions, Kozhanov added.

Complicating matters further is the fact that Iran is locked in a bitter shadow war with top US ally Israel. Tehran’s vowed to keep fighting despite Israel having severely weakened key proxies Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Both groups are designated terrorist organizations by the US and other countries.

"Transactional deals"

Iran’s response to Russian mediation will ultimately depend on top decision-maker Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Last month he said Tehran won’t be strong-armed to the negotiating table and said Trump was untrustworthy and dangerous because he jettisoned the Obama-era nuclear deal and continues to sanction Iran.

Furthermore, suspicion toward Russia — based on a troubled history — still looms large for many Iranian officials and allies of reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian are likely to question Moscow’s motives and whether they’re aligned with Iran’s interests.

“I don’t see them being viewed by Tehran as the most helpful mediator, especially as Russia and the US may be involved in lots of transactional deals and Iran may be afraid that it’ll be sold out in the process,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, deputy head of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Khamenei also appeared to weigh in on last week’s public spat between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House. A day after the confrontation, he wrote on X that Ukraine’s reliance on US support was a warning shot: like Afghanistan, Kyiv now finds itself abandoned by the country it depends on the most.

Still, there’s a growing chorus of voices who want to see Washington and Tehran work out their differences. Iran’s been steadily ramping up uranium enrichment, way beyond limits set by the defunct 2015 pact that Trump abrogated.

The United Nation’s nuclear watchdog on Monday said the US and Iran should begin talks, and that it was holding high-level discussions with the White House on the issue. That follows its warning last week that Tehran’s stockpile of near-bomb-grade fissile material had surged more than 50% since Trump’s election.

At the same time, Iranian officials are under intense pressure to deliver economic relief to a population exhausted by an acute cost-of-living crisis that’s been compounded by US sanctions under both Trump and President Joe Biden’s administration.