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Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (in response to a question from President Vladimir Putin on talks in Moscow on the Iranian nuclear issue):
Today, in just a few hours time, an Iranian delegation headed by the Secretary of the Security Council will arrive to hold talks with our Security Council and our Foreign Ministry. We will try, during these talks, to break the current deadlock in the situation with the Iranian nuclear programme before the next meeting of the IAEA Board of Governors at the beginning of March. We will try to make progress on the basis of our proposals to establish a joint venture for producing fuel for Iran’s civilian nuclear programme on Russian territory. These were the proposals that you advanced and subsequently developed as an initiative to establish multilateral centres for nuclear fuel production that would be open to all interested countries. We will also try to make use of the argument of Iran’s right to the nuclear fuel cycle once the IAEA experts have cleared up all the questions that have arisen in the past regarding Iran’s nuclear programme.
To be honest, we are not overly optimistic in our expectations, but we will try to do all we can to prevent the situation from escalating and keep it on the road to peaceful resolution.
February 20, 2006, The Kremlin, Moscow