By RIA Novosti,
United Nations : A six-nation meeting on the Iranian nuclear program has not been included in Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s UN General Assembly agenda, a source in the Russian delegation said on Wednesday.
“The minister will be unable to take part in such a meeting due to his busy timetable,” the source said.
A U.S. State Department spokesman said on Tuesday that a meeting to discuss Iran’s nuclear program involving the foreign ministers of the so-called Iran Six (Russia, China, the U.S., France, Britain, and Germany) had been cancelled.
Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Andrei Nesterenko earlier said that Russia saw no need to call an emergency meeting on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.
“We see no ‘fire alarm’ that would require us to give up everything and rush to meet for a discussion on Iran’s nuclear program during an extremely busy week at the UN General Assembly,” Nesterenko said.
The UN nuclear watchdog said on Monday it had not been able to make much progress on the issue of a possible military aspect to Iran’s nuclear program.
At a meeting with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in New York on Tuesday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reiterated that the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program was entirely peaceful and dismissed U.S. accusations that Tehran was striving to develop nuclear weapons.
Iran is currently under three sets of relatively mild UN Security Council sanctions for defying demands to halt uranium enrichment.