Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Saturday said Washington had demanded that Tehran hand over all its enriched uranium in return for a three-month reprieve from sanctions, rejecting this as "unacceptable.”
The United States "wants us to hand over all our enriched uranium to them, and in return they would give us three months" exemption from sanctions, Pezeshkian told reporters in New York before leaving for Tehran. "This is by no means acceptable."
United Nations sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program will be reimposed Sunday.
At the UN General Assembly this week in New York, Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi tried a last-minute diplomatic push to stop the sanctions. However, Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei boxed in their efforts by describing diplomacy with the United States as a “sheer dead end.”
Meanwhile, efforts by China and Russia to halt the sanctions failed Friday.
A 30-day clock for the sanctions started when France, Germany and the United Kingdom on Aug. 28 declared Iran wasn't complying with its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
Tehran has argued without success that the deal was voided by the United States' unilateral withdrawal from the accord in 2018 under President Donald Trump's first administration. Since then, Iran has severely restricted required inspections by the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, particularly after the 12-day war Israel launched on Iran in June. That war saw both the US and Israel bomb key Iranian nuclear sites.
