RUSSIA said it need no longer obey UN Security Council restrictions on giving missile technology to its ally Iran once they expire on Wednesday, without saying whether it now planned to support Tehran’s missile development.

“Supplies to and from Iran of products falling under the Missile Technology Control Regime no longer require prior approval by the UN Security Council,” Russia’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.

The restrictions were defined in Resolution 2231 of 2015 endorsing a deal by which Britain, China, the European Union, France, Germany, Russia and the US removed sanctions against Iran in return for Tehran curbing its nuclear programme.

In 2018, then-President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the deal, known as the JCPOA, leaving unilateral US sanctions in place, and Iran subsequently accelerated its nuclear programme, which it says is purely peaceful.

With the deal in shreds, UN sanctions intended to prevent the theocratic state developing long-range nuclear-capable ballistic missiles came back into force. But these will finally expire on Wednesday.

Russia has grown close to Iran since invading Ukraine in February 2022 and itself being shunned by the West. Many of the hundreds of one-way attack drones it has used to bomb Ukraine in the last year are believed to have been made in Iran.

Published in Dawn, October 18th, 2023