US Warns Of Sanctions On Iran Over Drone Supplies To Russia

The European Council, the institution that defines the general political direction and priorities of the European Union, added on Monday 11 individuals and four entities to the EU list of those subjected to restrictive measures in the context of the existing Iran human rights sanctions regime, a statement released Monday said. The EU list now comprises a total of 97 individuals and eight Iranian entities.

"The EU and its member states condemn the widespread and disproportionate use of force against peaceful protestors. This is unjustifiable and unacceptable. People in Iran, as anywhere else, have the right to peacefully protest and this right must be ensured in all circumstances," the statement read.

The latest measures consist of a travel ban and an asset freeze, in addition to prohibiting EU citizens and companies from making funds available to the listed individuals and entities.

The sanctions also include a ban on exports to Iran of equipment which might be used for the repression of protests and of equipment for monitoring telecommunications and surveillance.

"The EU expects Iran to immediately stop the violent crackdown against peaceful protesters, to free those detained, and to ensure the free flow of information, including internet access. Furthermore, the EU expects Iran to clarify the number of deaths and arrested," the EU said.

The new designations include Iran’s so-called ‘Morality Police’ and two of its key figures, Mohammad Rostami and Haj-Ahmad Mirzaei. In addition, the EU has designated Iran's police, known as the Law Enforcement Forces, as well as several of its local chiefs for their role in the crackdown on the protests.

The EU has also sanctioned the minister of information and communications technology, Issa Zarepour, for shutting down the internet to restrict access to information on the protests and impede communication among protesters.

Announcing “unanimous” decision to take action against those “responsible for the death of Mahsa Amini and violent repression of peaceful protests” in a tweet Monday, the EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell stressed that the EU will always act against serious human rights violations.

Borrel also said on Monday that he currently did not expect progress in negotiations over reviving the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. "I don't expect any move, that's a pity because we were very, very close," he said.

Iran-European Union relations have soured with claims Tehran has supplied Russia with armed drones used in Ukraine, although the EU is not yet expected to agree new sanctions.

Arriving in Luxemburg Monday for a meeting of EU foreign ministers, Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, said Europe would look for “concrete evidence” over reports that Russia had used Shahed-136 drones in recent weeks. The Washington Post backed up Ukrainian claims Sunday citing US and “allied” officials speaking anonymously.

The Washington Post cited “an intelligence assessment shared in recent days with Ukrainian and US officials [that] contends Iran’s armaments industry is preparing a first shipment of [surface-to-surface] Fateh-110 and Zolfagher missiles…” Reuters reported Monday its reporter had seen pieces of a drone bearing the words ‘For Belgorod,’ presumably referring to Saturday’s gunning down of 11 Russian trainee soldiers 40km north of the Ukraine border.

There have been differences within the 27-member EU over the Russia-Ukraine conflict over the extent of sanctions against Moscow, which continues to supply gas and oil to many European states. Denmark’s Foreign Minister, the Social Democrat Jeppe Kofod, called Monday for the EU to take “concrete steps” in response to Russian attacks on Kyiv Monday morning, with Reuters reporting at least three deaths. “Iranian drones are used apparently to attack in the middle of Kyiv, this is an atrocity,” Kofod said.

France has argued that Iran supplying drones to Russia would violate United Nations Security Council Resolution 2231, which endorsed the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement. Paris bases its case on the non-binding, informal Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) agreed by 35 states including Russia.

As signatories to the JCPOA, both France and Germany have been involved in the talks aimed at reviving the agreement, which the US left in 2018 prompting Iran to expand its nuclear program beyond JCPOA limits. The leeway for new European sanctions has been reduced by decline of Europe-Iran trade given European companies’ fear of US action against them under the ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions Washington introduced on leaving the JCPOA. Nonetheless, Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn Monday it was “no longer” enough just to extended the existing list of sanctioned Iranian individuals.

Iran denies supplying weapons to Russia. Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said Saturday – in comments made by telephone to Portuguese foreign minister Joao Gomes Cravinho – that Tehran believed “the arming of each side of the crisis will prolong the war.” The US has sent Ukraine $16.8 billion in aid, mainly in weapons, and the EU $2.5 billion, although Washington is denying Ukraine more advanced weapons so as to avoid escalation. Washington has said it wants to degrade Russian capacity as its stocks of Cruise and other missiles diminish.

‘Inconsistent behavior’

Comments made Monday by Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani reflected a deteriorating tone in EU-Iran relations. Kanaani highlighted what he said was “inconsistent behavior” by the French in suggesting there was “good and bad terrorism” and in condemning “disturbances” and “labor strikes” in France but welcoming them in Iran.

Kanaani portrayed Iran as an “anchor of stability” in a region where many countries – he cited Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria – “fell into chaos and were exposed to terrorism and foreign attacks.” The spokesman said that an arson attack on an Iranian school in Hamburg Thursday showed a failure to provide security for “Iranian diplomatic places.” He said there was a “bitter irony that the countries that export millions of dollars of arms to one side of the war [had] started a propaganda war against Iran.”

Kanaani stressed that while new EU sanctions would lead to “reciprocal reactions” from Iran, “the path of negotiations” was separate. The EU has coordinated efforts to revive the 2015 agreement, both in meetings April 2021-March 2022 in Vienna of all JCPAO signatories (China, France, Germany, Iran, Russia, the United Kingdom, with the United States taking part indirectly) and in subsequent bilateral contacts between Iran and the US. Kanaani also said Monday a prisoner exchange with the US was being held up by Washington’s insistence that the 2015 agreement be revived first.

In a report on Sunday, The Washington Post cited US and allied security officials as saying that the Islamic Republic is strengthening its commitment to supply arms for Russia’s assault on Ukraine. 

The report claims that the increased flow of weapons from Tehran could help offset steep Russian weapons losses and rebuild the dwindling supply of precision-guided munitions for Moscow’s military. 

The Post said that, according to officials from a US-allied country that closely monitors Iran’s weapons activity, Tehran dispatched officials to Russia on September 18 to finalize terms for additional weapons shipments. 

The paper quoted two officials briefed about an intelligence assessment shared in recent days with Ukrainian and US officials as saying that Iran’s armaments industry is preparing a first shipment of Fateh-110 and Zolfaghar missiles, two short-range ballistic missiles capable of striking targets at distances of 300 and 700 kilometers, respectively. It would be the first delivery of such missiles to Russia since the start of the war in February. 

In August, the same officials identified Iranian drones, the Shahed series and the Mohajer-6, that Tehran was supplying to Russia. The remains of both types have been recovered, analyzed and photographed by Ukrainian forces in recent weeks.

The European Union is mulling over punitive measures against Iran for its supply of drones to Russia, but despite numerous reports, the 27-nation bloc is still trying to find independent evidence for the use of the drones.

During this period, Khamenei has made it clear at least twice that he wants the protests to be crushed and protesters punished heavy-handedly. Although a few officials including Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi and Mashhad Friday prayers Imam Ahmad Alamolhoda have echoed Khamenei’s call for violent crackdown, several politicians including one government minister, a senior aide, and several lawmakers and former state officials have pointed out that the regime needs to make compromises on some of its values in order to peacefully curb the dissent.

Khamenei’s senior aide Ali Larijani, a former speaker of the Iranian parliament, said in an October 12 interview with Ettela’at Newspaper, which is owned and maintained by Khamenei’s office, that the regime’s “insistence on its social values will elicit violent reactions on the part of the protesters.” Quoting another state official as saying that more than 50 percent of Iranian women do not observe the government-imposed dress code, Larijani said: “When a behavior is so widely prevalent in the society it is wrong to involve the police in a bid to curb that behavior.”

Meanwhile on October 11, referring to the government and Iranian hard-liners’ attempt to impose a rekigious lifestyle on modern Iranian women, Tourism Minister Ezzatollah Zarghami asked in a tweet that “what should the people do if they do not wish to be guided by the morality police?”

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On Friday, Khamenei’s representative and the Friday prayers imam of Mashhad, accused the critics, including the minister, of undermining the holy Koran and Iran’s constitutional law. He also accused the protesters of not believing in God and his prophet; an accusation that could entail the death sentence for the protesters.

On the same day, Iranian lawmaker, Gholamreza Montazeri, who is the deputy chairman of the Cultural Committee of the Iranian parliament, expressed his opposition to a violent crackdown on protests and called for understanding the new generation which comprises a majority of protesters.

However, instead of addressing Khamenei, which could have endangered his position as a lawmaker, he chose to address the Interior Minister who had echoed Khamenei’s statement. He said: “If you deprive Iranian protestors of voicing their criticism of the system, they will turn to strangers and talk to them.”

Earlier in this week, former labor minister Ali Rabiei and former presidential chief of staff Mohamad Ali Abtahi warned the government, and in fact Khamenei, that “if the dissatisfactions are not addressed properly, dissent will remain active and sooner or later it will find its way into the streets.” They added that "the world is listening to the voice of Iranians' protest and stressed that this voice should be also heard inside Iran."

On Thursday, the editor of Jomhouri Eslami newspaper, Masih Mohajeri and senior cleric Ayatollah Abdollah Javadi Amoli called on the government, as they too shied away from addressing Khamenei for fear of repression, to understand the protesters and the causes of dissent and bring about changes that would make the government efficient in dealing with the country’s problems.

However, regardless of all the criticism and advice from regime insiders, Khamenei finds it hard to listen to anyone. Earlier this week, when Judiciary Chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei called for a dialogue between the government and the protesters, he was forced in less than a day to change his words and order the courts of law under his jurisdiction to deal with protesters with utmost firmness and not to ignore the slightest wrongdoing.

In a tweet on Friday, the top EU diplomat said he spoke with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, conveying to him “EU's clear and united position: people in Iran have the right to peaceful protest and to defend fundamental rights.”

"Violent repression must stop immediately. Protesters must be released. Internet access and accountability are needed," he added.

According to unconfirmed reports, the EU is set to sanction four entities and 11 high-ranking Iranian military and security officials for their roles in the repression of the uprising, ignited by the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. 

Also on Friday, a senior EU official said the EU foreign ministers will meet in Luxembourg on Monday to discuss the transfer of Iranian drones to Russia, noting that the ministers will not take any decisions on additional Iran sanctions but could reach a political agreement on future sanctions linked to a transfer of drones. 

Despite numerous reports by the Ukrainian military about the use of the Iranian drones by the Russian forces, the 27-nation bloc is still trying to find independent evidence for the use of Tehran-supplied drones in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the official added. 

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said on October 10, Russia had used Iran-made drones to attack dozens of civilian targets in Ukraine. The Ukrainian military claimed on October 8 that Russia has sent Iranian military drones to Belarus for possible attacks in western or central parts of Ukraine.