TEHRAN: Sweeping United Nations sanctions loomed for Iran for the first time in a decade, after last-ditch nuclear talks with Western powers failed to produce a breakthrough.

President Masoud Pezeshkian said the United States had offered Iran only a short reprieve in return for handing over its whole stockpile of enriched uranium, an offer he described as unacceptable.

An 11th-hour effort by Iran allies Russia and China to postpone the sanctions until April failed to win enough votes on the Security Council on Friday, meaning they will go into effect at midnight GMT on Saturday.

In an address to the UN General Assembly on Saturday, Russia’s top diplomat Sergei Lavrov accused Western governments of sabotaging diplomacy on Iran.

Their rejection of the Russian-Chinese bid to delay the sanctions “finally exposed the West’s policy of sabotaging the pursuit of constructive solutions in the UN Security Council, as well as its desire to extract unilateral concessions from Tehran through blackmail and pressure”, he said.

Though Iran allowed inspectors back into some of its nuclear facilities, Western governments said they saw insufficient progress to justify delaying sanctions, after a week of high-level diplomacy.

European powers triggered the “snapback” mechanism a month ago, accusing Iran of failing to comply with its obligations under a 2015 deal with major powers that saw the UN sanctions frozen in return for restrictions on its nuclear activities.

Pezeshkian told reporters in New York that Washington had asked Tehran to relinquish all its enriched uranium in exchange for a three-month reprieve from sanctions.

The US “wants us to hand over all our enriched uranium to them, and in return they would give us three months” exemption from sanctions, Pezeshkian told reporters in New York. “This is by no means acceptable,” he said.

Published in Dawn, September 28th, 2025