Khamenei: US Must Lift Sanctions for Iran to Return to Nuclear Commitments

Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei delivers a televised speech, in Tehran, Iran January 8, 2021. (Handout via Reuters)
Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei delivers a televised speech, in Tehran, Iran January 8, 2021. (Handout via Reuters)
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Khamenei: US Must Lift Sanctions for Iran to Return to Nuclear Commitments

Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei delivers a televised speech, in Tehran, Iran January 8, 2021. (Handout via Reuters)
Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei delivers a televised speech, in Tehran, Iran January 8, 2021. (Handout via Reuters)

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said on Sunday that the United States should lift all sanctions if Washington wants Tehran to reverse its nuclear steps.

“Iran has fulfilled all its obligations under the 2015 nuclear deal, not the United States and the three European countries ... If they want Iran to return to its commitments, the United States must lift all sanctions first,” Khamenei wrote on Twitter.

“After verifying whether all sanctions have been lifted, then we will return to full compliance,” he wrote.

US President Joe Biden, who took office last month, has said that if Tehran returned to strict compliance with the 2015 nuclear pact, Washington would follow suit and use that as a springboard to a broader agreement that might restrict Iran’s missile development and regional activities.

Former US President Donald Trump exited the nuclear accord between Iran and six powers in 2018 and reimposed sanctions on Tehran.

Iran has breached the deal in a step-by-step response to Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy, but it has repeatedly said it could quickly reverse those violations if US sanctions are removed.



Russia Awaits Ukraine's Confirmation on Planned Exchange of Dead Fighters, Officials Say

A member of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces prepares to use a drone at a damaged school after a missile strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, at a residential area in Kharkiv, Ukraine Jun 2, 2022. REUTERS/Ivan Alvarado
A member of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces prepares to use a drone at a damaged school after a missile strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, at a residential area in Kharkiv, Ukraine Jun 2, 2022. REUTERS/Ivan Alvarado
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Russia Awaits Ukraine's Confirmation on Planned Exchange of Dead Fighters, Officials Say

A member of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces prepares to use a drone at a damaged school after a missile strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, at a residential area in Kharkiv, Ukraine Jun 2, 2022. REUTERS/Ivan Alvarado
A member of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces prepares to use a drone at a damaged school after a missile strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, at a residential area in Kharkiv, Ukraine Jun 2, 2022. REUTERS/Ivan Alvarado

Russian officials said Sunday that Moscow is still awaiting official confirmation from Ukraine that a planned exchange of 6,000 bodies of soldiers killed in action will take place, reiterating allegations that Kyiv had postponed the swap.

On the front line in the war, Russia said that it had pushed into Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region.

Russian state media quoted Lt. Gen. Alexander Zorin, a representative of the Russian negotiating group, as saying that Russia delivered the first batch of 1,212 bodies of Ukrainian soldiers to the exchange site at the border and is waiting for confirmation from Ukraine, but that there were “signals” that the process of transferring the bodies would be postponed until next week, The AP news reported.

Citing Zorin on her Telegram channel, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova asked whether it was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's “personal decision not to take the bodies of the Ukrainians” or whether “someone from NATO prohibited it."

Russia and Ukraine each accused the other on Saturday of endangering plans to swap 6,000 bodies of soldiers killed in action, which was agreed upon during direct talks in Istanbul on Monday that otherwise made no progress toward ending the war.

Vladimir Medinsky, an aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin, led the Russian delegation. Medinsky said that Kyiv called a last-minute halt to an imminent swap. In a Telegram post on Saturday, he said that refrigerated trucks carrying more than 1,200 bodies of Ukrainian troops from Russia had already reached the agreed exchange site at the border when the news came.

In response, Ukraine said that Russia was playing “dirty games” and manipulating facts.

According to the main Ukrainian authority dealing with such swaps, no date had been set for repatriating the bodies. In a statement on Saturday, the agency also accused Russia of submitting lists of prisoners of war for repatriation that didn’t correspond to agreements reached on Monday.