EU leaders approved tighter sanctions on Thursday targeting Iran's oil and gas sector, a day after the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on some Iranian banks, companies and Revolutionary Guard Corps members. However,Moscow blasted these latest moves. The Russian deputy foreign minister called unilateral U.S. and EU sanctions "harmful" and warned the West it risks losing his country's support for efforts to rein in Tehran's nuclear activity.
"We are extremely disappointed that neither the United States nor the European Union is heeding our calls to refrain from such steps," Interfax and Itar-Tass news agencies news quoted Sergei Ryabkov as saying. "We are drawing certain conclusions from this, including about the prospects for joint work" within the U.N. Security Council.
Unilateral sanctions that go beyond U.N. measures "are not just harmful, they undermine the very foundation of our joint work with our partners in the sextet and the Security Council".
