THE Obama administration was elated a month ago when the Russian president said sanctions against Iran for its nuclear programme could become "inevitable". Washington's reaction may have been significantly premature.
Dmitry Medvedev's words were seen as a major Kremlin shift and one that would buttress American attempts to combine renewed negotiations with Tehran and a united front that threatened Iran with punishing global sanctions for failure to come clean abo
ut its nuclear ambitions.
The United States, Britain, France and Germany believe Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon behind the cover of what Tehran says is a programme designed solely to enable a network of reactors to generate electricity.
Russia and China, the other two key players who engage Iran on the nuclear issue, had routinely rejected tough sanctions, arguing that negotiations were the way forward. But Mr Medvedev emerged from talks with US president Barack Obama on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly last month to declare of Iran: "In some cases, sanctions are inevitable."
While clearly delighted with those words, the White House hotly rejected analyses that Mr Medvedev was signalling a course change as a pay-off for Mr Obama's decision a week earlier to scrap a missile defence shield in eastern Europe. The US missile system, conceived under the Bush administration purportedly to defend against attack from Iran, had become a major factor in deteriorating US-Russian relations.
Nevertheless, Mr Obama's top Russia adviser acknowledged that the decision against proceeding on missile defence – a deployment Moscow said would have threatened its security – was a factor in Mr Medvedev's remarks.
While Mr Medvedev said sanctions could become necessary, Moscow was not long in telling Washington – and major trading partner Iran – that the time had not come yet. That clearly deflated expectations raised when Washington drew so much attention to Mr Medvedev's much hailed remarks. "Threats, sanctions and threats of pressure in the current situation, we are convinced, would be counterproductive," Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said during US secretary of state Hillary Clinton's visit to the Russian capital last week.
And prime minister Vladimir Putin, who absented himself on a trip to Beijing, drew a line under Mr Lavrov's comments. "If we speak about some kind of sanctions now, before we take concrete steps, we will fail to create favourable conditions for negotiations," he said. "That is why we consider such talk premature."
Positions could clarify somewhat in talks this week in Vienna, where the US, France, Russia, the UN nuclear agency and Iran work out a proposal that would send some of Tehran's low-grade enriched uranium to Russia for further processing to fuel an ageing Iranian reactor used for medical research. If expanded, that programme might become the model for undercutting the need for Iran to continue with its own uranium enrichment, a technology which could shortly achieve the sophistication to create weapons-grade material for use in a nuclear bomb.
And later this month, Iran will allow UN inspectors to examine a newly disclosed uranium enrichment facility under construction near the holy city of Qom.
Iran's new, if limited, readiness to co-operate after years of stonewalling once its secret nuclear programme became public could portend a more significant shift. And Mr Medvedev could be partly responsible. "This time, it seems to me they (the Russians] are moving a bit to suggest to Tehran that Russia should not be taken for granted or ignored when it comes to meeting what Russia also says are legitimate expectations about Iranian behaviour," said James Collins, a former US ambassador to Russia. But, he said, the White House "probably overplayed their hand", in that the Russians' patience for negotiating with the Iranians could stretch far beyond that of Washington.
