MOSCOW (Dispatches) —
Russian President Vladimir Putin will visit Iran next week, the Kremlin said Tuesday.
During a trip to Tehran next Tuesday, Putin will attend a trilateral meeting with the presidents of Iran and Turkey, the so-called Astana format of meetings for Syria-related talks, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
The three countries have so far held 18 rounds of talks, initially in the Kazakh capital of Astana. The last triple summit was held in the Kazakh capital Nur-Sultan in mid-June.
Putin’s visit to Iran will follow U.S. President Joe Biden’s trip to Occupied Palestine and Saudi Arabia this week, where Iran will be a key subject of discussion.
In a tweet on Sunday, Iran’s Nour News which is close to the country’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) slammed a U.S. plan to form a so-called joint defense pact with the occupying regime of Israel and some regional Arab states, warning that a decisive response will await any threat against the country’s security.
“If the implementation of such plans threatens security of #Iran in any way, it will face initial decisive response to the nearest & most accessible targets,” the news website tweeted.
Peskov told reporters that on the visit to Tehran, Putin will also have a separate meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
In March, Erdogan helped mediate talks between Russian and Ukrainian representatives in Istanbul, Turkey. Peskov said there was no discussion about a new round of such negotiations.
In Tehran, Muhammadrez Pourebrahimi, the head of the Iranian Parliament’s economic committee, told IRNA news agency that Putin’s trip would seek to improve economic relations between the two sanctions-hit nations.
On Monday, a top U.S. official claimed that Iran was planning to supply hundreds of drones with combat weapon capabilities to Russia for use in Ukraine.
“The Iranian government is preparing to provide Russia with up to several hundred UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), including weapons-capable UAVs, on an expedited timeline,” White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters.
“Our information further indicates that Iran is preparing to train Russian forces to use these UAVs, with initial training sessions slated to begin as soon as early July,” he said.
Iran responded on Tuesday by saying that “no special development” had taken place in technological cooperation with Russia.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani said cooperation with Russia “in the field of some modern technologies predates the war in Ukraine, and there has been no special development in that regard recently.”
Tehran’s position regarding the war “is quite clear and has been officially announced many times,” he added.
Iran has maintained that it is against the war in Ukraine and called for a political solution, while blaming the roots of the crisis on the United States and NATO’s expansion.
“The claim of the American official (Sullivan) comes as the U.S. and the Europeans have for years turned the occupying and aggressor countries, including in the West Asia region, into a storehouse of their various deadly weapons,” Kanani added.