DUSHANBE — Iran’s first vice president told Russia’s prime minister on Monday that Ukraine is stoking instability in northern Iran through attacks on the Caspian region, and that Moscow and Tehran must not let it damage their ties, TASS reported.
Mohammad Reza Aref spoke across the table from Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, on the sidelines of a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation heads-of-government meeting in the Tajik capital. Grain and food supplies are “of particular importance for the development of our relations,” Aref said, and “Ukraine has caused some instability in this region, in the north of our country.” “We must not allow this country to achieve its goals and create problems and obstacles in ties between our two countries,” he added.
TASS did not say which attacks he meant. One candidate is the Ukrainian strike on an Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea on July 25, which Iran’s foreign ministry said killed one sailor, as TEH reported. President Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv had hit vessels involved in military cargo shipments involving Iran and a Russian warship.
Russia’s side of the sea has been hit too. The Kyiv Independent reported that Ukrainian special forces struck oil infrastructure at the Makhachkala port in Dagestan on September 10, saying the strike “directly affects Russia’s ability to use the Caspian Sea for the transport and transshipment of energy resources.” The paper could not verify the damage.
Mishustin’s published opening remarks, in the Russian government’s transcript, mention neither the Caspian nor Ukraine. He said the strategic partnership treaty has been in force since last October, that Russia condemned the armed aggression against Iran, and that bilateral trade grew last year and is still rising, without giving a figure. He also called the North-South transport corridor, which links Eurasia to the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, a project now developing actively. Aref’s words come from TASS’s report, because the transcript excerpt stops where Mishustin hands him the floor.
In Tehran the same day, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a joint news conference with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi that “Russia has no intention to abandon the implementation of economic and investment agreements with Iran,” TASS reported. Lavrov had been in Manama a day earlier, where he presented a Gulf security concept to the Gulf Cooperation Council.
What Mishustin said in reply is not on the record. The excerpt of the transcript ends with “to be continued,” and no Ukrainian response to Aref’s remarks has been published in the sources TEH read.
