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Kuchins: Russians Working Hard to Resolve Iranian Nuclear Crisis

Council on Foreign Relations

Interviewee: Andrew Kuchins, Director and Senior Fellow, Russia and Eurasia Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor

October 30, 2007

Andrew C. Kuchins, a long-time expert on Russia, says despite worsening U.S.-Russian relations, Russian officials are working very hard to “to talk the Iranians down and out of a nuclear weapons program.” He says the recent meeting between President Vladimir Putin in Tehran with the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the sudden visit of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to Tehran all demonstrate Moscow’s efforts to defuse the crisis. “The Russians are really quite close to us on Iran and they are almost as fed up with the failure of the Iranians to be more compliant with the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on their nuclear program,” he says.

You’ve just come back from another trip to Moscow. What sense did you get about U.S.-Russian relations?

The term “U.S.-Russian relations” reminds me of an old phrase of Bismarck—“Russia is never as strong as it seems nor as weak as it seems.” I think when we look at U.S.-Russian relations over the last fifteen years or so, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, I don’t think they’re ever as good as some people think or as bad as others think. Certainly right now the mood in the bilateral relationship is as bad as it’s been in a long time, and I think the press reporting makes it out to be relatively negative, but I think on some things we’re still getting a reasonable level of cooperation, particularly on Iran.

In a recent press conference, President Bush characterized the U.S.-Russian relationship in a different way. He said: we disagree on a lot of things, we agree on some things, and one of those things is Iran. He never put the balance that way before.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2007 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.