Russian President Vladimir Putin refused yesterday to bend to Western pressure over Iran, saying after talks with French President Nicolas Sarkozy that he did not believe the Islamic republic was trying to build a nuclear bomb.
"We do not have information that Iran is trying to create a nuclear weapon. We operate on the principle that Iran does not have those plans," Putin told journalists after the end of the talks with Sarkozy in Moscow.
He added that Russia shared the West's desire for Iran's nuclear program, in which Russia is building the first civilian power station, to be "absolutely transparent."
PHOTO: EPA
The Kremlin leader's statement reaffirmed an East-West split over Iran. Moscow supports Tehran in rejecting accusations by Washington and in EU capitals that the country is hiding a secret bomb making project behind its Russian-backed civilian atomic program.
Russia has also been reluctant to back Western calls for tougher sanctions aimed at forcing Iran to halt sensitive nuclear activities.
Sarkozy said after his talks in the Kremlin that Putin's readiness was "important."
"After that, there might be a difference in the analysis," he said.
But there was no sign of confirmation that Franco-Russian positions on the controversy had "moved closer," as Sarkozy had indicated following a dinner with Putin on Tuesday night.
This was the first visit as president to Moscow for the new French leader, who stands out among Western leaders for his firm criticism of human rights in Putin's Russia.
Earlier, Sarkozy told students at Moscow's State Technical University that Russia must embrace political freedom.
"Build a democratic society in Russia and the world will be grateful," he said.
Sarkozy was also due to meet with the leaders of Russia's most active human-rights organization Memorial.
However, speaking at the press conference with Putin yesterday, Sarkozy avoided controversy, saying: "France does not want to give lessons to anyone."
On Kosovo, another issue sharply dividing Russia and the Western powers, Sarkozy appealed for European countries to remain united, since "this is foremost a European issue."
However, he said that it was important "that the discussion remains open with our Russian friends."
Russia has sided with Serbia in opposing French and other Western backing for independence in the ethnic-Albanian dominated province, currently administered by the UN.
Sarkozy, who met Putin for the first time at the G8 summit in Germany in June, has worked to steer France closer to the US, but he stressed that this did not mean greater confrontation with Russia.
"I am a friend of the United States, but that does not mean a vassal ... I have disagreements with the United States. The world cannot be ruled over by one power, even the main one," he told the students.
Putin praised strong growth in French-Russian bilateral trade and Sarkozy announced that French companies were keen to buy into Russia's state-controlled gas giant Gazprom.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS