Iran Poised To Continue Development Despite Western Sanctions - President

Sanctions by the United States and other Western countries are futile in hindering Iran's development, Iranian President Seyyed Ebrahim Raisi said on Wednesday

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 19th January, 2022) Sanctions by the United States and other Western countries are futile in hindering Iran's development, Iranian President Seyyed Ebrahim Raisi said on Wednesday.

Raisi is currently on a visit to Russia. On Wednesday, he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

"We have been resisting the United States for more than 40 years now. We will never stop Iran's development and progress because of sanctions or threats, though we are now making efforts to have the sanctions lifted," Raisi said at the meeting with Putin.

Raisi, a hardline cleric close to Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was elected president in June 2021.

Russia expects Raisi's visit to result in an "inventory of relations," given the change in leadership of Iran, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.

The United States had imposed dozens of sanctions on Iran since 1979, in what the Iranian government dubbed a policy of "maximum pressure," before signing the multiparty Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015. The nuclear deal stipulated the removal of sanctions in exchange for Iran scaling back its nuclear program.

In 2018, former US President Donald Trump withdrew the country from the JCPOA and reimposed sanctions on Iran, to which the latter responded with a gradual abandoning of its own commitments under the deal. Several more packages of US sanctions against Iran have followed since then.

After the change of power in the US, both parties agreed to try to restore the nuclear deal. The negotiations, hosted in Vienna, entered their eighth round in late December.