MOSCOW (Dispatches) -- Iran’s vice president and head of the country’s atomic energy organization, Muhammad Eslami, is in Moscow for talks with the chief executive of Russian state nuclear firm Rosatom, the RIA news agency cited Iran’s embassy as saying on Tuesday.
Eslami planned to discuss cooperation between the two countries in the nuclear power sector, it said.
Eslami said Iran and Russia have strategic ties on various fronts, expressing Tehran’s willingness to improve and accelerate cooperation in the field of nuclear energy.
He added that he would hold talks with Russian officials on ways to revive the multilateral 2015 nuclear agreement, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was abandoned by the US in 2018.
On Saturday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov criticized unilateral sanctions imposed on Iran after the U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear agreement, urging Washington to take a “more active” approach to help resume the stalled talks aimed at reviving the deal.
Eslami rejected a U.S. call to grant UN inspectors access to a nuclear site, saying Washington was not qualified to demand inspections without condemning a sabotage attack on the facility.
“Countries that did not condemn terrorist acts against Iran’s nuclear site are not qualified to comment on inspections there,” Eslami said during his visit to Moscow.
The United States said on Monday that Iran must stop denying the UN nuclear agency access to a workshop making centrifuge parts or face diplomatic retaliation at the agency’s Board of Governors meeting.

The workshop at the TESA Karaj complex makes components for centrifuges, machines that enrich uranium, and was hit by apparent sabotage in June in which one of four International Atomic Energy Agency cameras there was destroyed.
Iran removed them and the destroyed camera’s footage is missing.
Eslami said the Americans did not condemn the terrorist operation at Iran’s nuclear site. “Therefore, their insistence [on inspection of] the sites that have been targeted by terrorist attacks is not accepted and we expect the agency to abide by the law.”
The top Iranian nuclear official also criticized the UN nuclear agency for engaging in “political and selective” behavior under pressure from the U.S. and the Zionist regime.