G-7 Diplomats Warn Iran Against Providing Drones to Russia

At the end of a two-day meeting in the German city of Münster, where officials discussed the war and the West’s relations with China , the officials warned they would take further measures against Russia and countries that are assisting its campaign in Ukraine .

“We will continue to impose economic costs in Russia and on other countries, individuals or entities providing military support for Moscow’s war of aggression, as several of us have already done regarding Iran’s provision of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to Russia,” the group said in a statement Friday.

The U.S. and its G-7 allies pledged to continue supporting Ukraine economically and militarily and introduced a new system to help Ukraine “repair, restore and defend its critical energy and water infrastructure.”

With talks on reviving a deal to restrict Iran’s nuclear program stalling, Western tensions with Tehran have mounted sharply in recent months, and have been aggravated by Iran’s supplying of military drones to Russia, which Moscow and Tehran have denied. Friction has been increased, too, by Iran’s arrest of several European citizens as part of a clampdown on protests that erupted across the country following the death in police custody of a young woman in September.

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The diplomats expressed “support for the fundamental aspiration of Iran for a future where human rights are respected and protected” and urged Tehran to allow United Nations human-rights officials to access the country.

“This generation of Iranians are demonstrating that their desire to be free and have opportunity will not be extinguished even by the fiercest repression,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a press conference after the meeting.

The group also slammed Iran’s “destabilizing activities” through the delivery of drones, missiles and other weaponry both in the Middle East and to Russia .

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The European Union, U.K. and U.S. have imposed sanctions on Iran over the past few weeks for the crackdown on protesters and for Iran’s provision of drones to Russia. Broader sanctions are expected on both issues in the coming weeks.

U.S. officials have also warned that Iran is preparing to supply Russia with missiles, including possibly ballistic missiles, in coming weeks.

The G-7 group said Friday that “Iran has not made the necessary decisions” to revive the nuclear agreement of 2015, despite 18 months of negotiations. The agreement imposed tight but temporary restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of most international sanctions.

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The U.S. left the nuclear deal in 2018 and Iran has since undertaken a significant expansion of its nuclear activities . U.S. and European officials say Iran is a few weeks away from having enough weapons-grade nuclear material for one nuclear weapon. Iran says its nuclear program is for purely peaceful civilian purposes.

The diplomats reiterated their determination that Iran must never develop a nuclear weapon and expressed deep concern about the “unabated expansion of Iran’s nuclear program.”

Western officials had hoped the nuclear talks would resume after the coming U.S. midterm elections , but that was before Russia started using Iranian-supplied drones in Ukraine and Tehran’s clampdown on street protests.

In recent days, U.S. officials have said the Biden administration, which set the revival of the 2015 nuclear pact as a top foreign-policy goal, isn’t currently focused on the diplomatic effort, saying that Iran has refused to drop unacceptable demands related to the deal since the start of September.

That was echoed Friday in Münster by European officials.

EU foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell,

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who is the official chairman of the nuclear talks, said Friday morning that “we are in a stalemate” on the talks, while German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said the agreement “has been put on ice for the time being.”

Iran has said it is still open to concluding the nuclear talks, blaming Washington for the delay in progress. Tehran has said it would send a delegation of officials to Vienna to try to unblock a key sticking point: Tehran’s insistence that the U.N. atomic energy agency drop a probe into Iran’s nuclear activities as part of any deal.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has accused Iran of stonewalling its three-year-old investigation of undeclared nuclear material found in Iran.

On Ukraine, the U.S. and its G-7 allies pledged to “stand firmly with Ukraine for as long as it takes,” the officials said. They didn’t pledge specific sums of money for the effort, or detail how it would be organized.

In recent weeks, Russia has broadened its attacks on Ukrainian civilians and infrastructure, triggering blackouts in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities under the government’s control and knocking out around 40% of the country’s power system, as winter approaches.

With millions left without power, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday evening that Russia was carrying out “energy terror” against his people. He said that Russia’s attack on civilian infrastructure was a new effort to defeat Ukraine amid Ukrainian troop advances on the battlefield.

Western powers in recent days have vowed to give Ukraine more help to cope with the Russian attacks. Last month, Germany sent generators to Ukraine and Britain said on Thursday it was providing 850 generators and a guaranteed loan of 50 million pounds, equivalent to around $56.5 million, for Ukraine’s electricity grid operator to help the country. French President Emmanuel Macron is gathering French firms and then international partners next month to provide critical infrastructure for Ukraine for the winter.

Mr. Blinken said the G-7 coordination on energy supplies would operate much like the process for cooperating on Western arms deliveries to Kyiv.

“President Putin seems to have decided if he can’t seize Ukraine by force, he will try to freeze it into submission,” he said.

“We salute the bravery and resilience of the Ukrainian people in the face of Russia’s unprovoked aggression, and we are committed to helping Ukraine meet its winter preparedness needs,” the senior diplomats from the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada said.

A senior U.S. State Department official said that discussions were continuing about how to fund Ukraine’s reconstruction and that no decisions had been made on using frozen Russian financial assets for that purpose.

The G-7 meeting in Germany coincided with a visit to Beijing by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping is being closely monitored by U.S. and European officials for signs of how the continent’s largest economy will interact with China following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

During the visit, the two leaders opposed any threats to use nuclear weapons, according to Mr. Scholz and a report from China’s state-owned Xinhua News Agency. The warning came after Russian President Vladimir Putin hinted in recent weeks that Moscow could deploy nuclear weapons.

The G-7 statement made no mention of the sensitive topic of Chinese investment in strategic Western sectors such as ports and telecommunications, saying only that the group would “aim for constructive cooperation with China, where possible and in our interest.”

Mr. Blinken said the alignment between Europe and Washington on China was “strong and increasingly clear.”

Write to Laurence Norman at [email protected] and Warren P. Strobel at [email protected]