By RIA Novosti
Tehran : Iran’s foreign minister has said he hopes for expansion of cooperation with Russia.
“A positive time has come in relations between Russia and Iran, and economic cooperation of our countries is positively developing,” Manouchehr Mottaki said Sunday, adding that trade turnover in 2007 grew 100 percent.
Mottaki said the Bushehr nuclear power plant, which is being built by Russia in southern Iran, would start working by the summer of 2008 initially at 50 percent of its capacity.
The Russian contractor for the $1 billion project, state-controlled Atomstroyexport, had said earlier the plant would not be commissioned before the end of 2008.
The US and other Western powers suspect Iran of secret plans to build nuclear weapons and have pushed for measures to force Tehran to halt uranium enrichment, which can be used both in power generation and weapons production, but Iran insists its nuclear programme is civilian.