Tabnak – Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif traveled to the Black Sea resort city of Sochi on Wednesday to exchange views with Russian officials on regional and bilateral developments. It seems that the future of Iran’s nuclear deal and the Syrian issue are on the top of Zarif’s visit to Russia.
Zarif arrived in Sochi on Wednesday and is expected to meet his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, among other officials. Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said on Tuesday that Zarif’s discussions would focus on the current situation in the Middle East, particularly Syria.
"The talks will center round everything that concerns the Middle East, Syria, the situation in the region in general,” he told Russia’s TASS news agency. Bogdanov also noted that his country has "close contacts with the Iranians, on-going consultations on all issues, including concerning the situation in Iraq, in the [Persian] Gulf, on counter-terrorism efforts.”
Zarif himself stated that coordination on regional and mutual issues is on top of Iran's Foreign Minister's agenda in his visit to Sochi. 'Further coordination between Iran and Russia on the nuclear agreement, especially after recent policies adopted by the US against the deal, is among the goals of my visit to Sochi,' the Foreign Minister said.
'There has always been good coordination between Tehran and Moscow, as the two have supported each other’s' stances in international organizations and in multilateral relations,' Zarif told reporters upon arriving in Sochi.
He added that Russia has backed Iran on the nuclear agreement signed between Tehran and the world major powers in 2015, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Coordination with Russia on Syria is another purpose of the visit, the Foreign Minister added.
Meanwhile, in a relevant development on Wednesday, a working group of the three countries acting as guarantors of a ceasefire in Syria, namely Iran, Russia and Turkey, began consultations in Astana, in the run-up to the sixth round of the intra-Syrian talks in the Kazakh capital.
"This Astana meeting is widely expected to be a huge success, to finalize the whole Astana process since January. A lot of work has been done at the expert level and the highest political level, to reach a final agreement on the whole package of documents, on all de-escalation zones,” a source close to the Astana talks told Russia’s Sputnik news agency.
The upcoming Astana talks is aimed at working out the details of the fourth de-escalation zone, in Syria’s western Idlib Province, where significant concentrations of ISIS terrorists, most notably from al-Nusra Front, are operating.
