Iran’s president on Monday denied his country had sent drones to Russia for use in the war in Ukraine, even as the United States accuses Iran of not only providing the weapons but helping Russia build a plant to manufacture them.
“We are against the war in Ukraine,” President Ebrahim Raisi said as he met with media executives on the sidelines of the world’s premier global conference, the high-level leaders’ meeting at the U.N. General Assembly.
The Iranian leader spoke just hours after five Americans who had been held in Iranian custody arrived in Qatar, freed in a deal that saw President Joe Biden agree to unlock nearly $6 billion in frozen Iranian assets.
Raisi acknowledged that Iran and Russia have long had strong ties, including defense cooperation. But he denied sending weapons to Moscow since the war began. “If they have a document that Iran gave weapons or drones to the Russians after the war,” he said, then they should produce it.
Despite his remarks about trust, Raisi’s tone toward the United States wasn’t all conciliatory; he had harsh words at other moments.
Raisi said his country “sought good relations with all neighboring countries” in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
“We believe that if the Americans stop interfering in the countries of the Persian Gulf and other regions in the world, and mind their own business … the situation of the countries and their relations will improve,” Raisi said.
The United Arab Emirates first sought to reengage diplomatically with Tehran after attacks on ships off their coasts that were attributed to Iran. Saudi Arabia, with Chinese mediation, reached a détente in March to re-establish diplomatic ties after years of tensions, including over the kingdom’s war on Yemen, Riyadh’s opposition to Syrian President Bashar Assad and fears over Iran’s nuclear program.
Raisi warned other countries in the region not to get too close with U.S. ally Israel, saying: “The normalization of relations with the Zionist regime does not create security.”
As a prosecutor, Raisi took part in the 1988 mass executions that killed some 5,000 dissidents in Iran.
The Iranian leader was dismissive of Western criticism of his country’s treatment of women, its nuclear program and its crackdown on dissent, including over protests that began just over a year ago over the death in police custody last year of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman arrested for allegedly violating Iran’s mandatory headscarf law.
