Macron Opens Iran Talks With Putin In First Call Since 2022

French President Emmanuel Macron and Vladimir Putin agreed to coordinate their approach on Iran in their first phone call since 2022, marking a rare overture from a European head to the Russian leader. 

The call is part of an effort to forge a common approach between the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council on Iran, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive information. Paris informed allies including Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of the conversation, two people said. 

“The two presidents decided to coordinate their approaches and to speak to each other in the near future in order to follow up on this issue together,” the French presidency said in a statement Tuesday after the call, which lasted for more than two hours. Putin called the talks “substantive.”

As he eyes the end of his second and final presidential term, in less than two years, Macron has sought to burnish his credentials as a player on the global stage. Last week, he said he planned to go to all permanent members of the Security Council to discuss their positions on Iran and its nuclear program. At the same time, he reassured Zelenskiy before and after his conversation with Putin that France maintained its support for the under-siege nation, according to people familiar with the matter. 

On Tuesday, the leaders agreed to keep up contacts for “potential coordination of positions,” the Kremlin said. Russia is one of the permanent members of the council, along with the US, UK, China and France. 

Sergei Markov, a Moscow-based political consultant close to Kremlin, said he believed the conversation was related to broader efforts to limit Iran’s uranium enrichment. Russia has said it supports Iran’s right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. Russia built Iran’s nuclear power plant at Bushehr and has been working on expanding it.

“The Europeans need Russia to persuade Iran to give up its uranium-enrichment program,” Markov said. “Russia and France both are interested in Iran abandoning enrichment because they can handle uranium-enrichment for Iran themselves.”

The move is perilous nonetheless. Last year, then-German Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke to Putin in an hour-long phone call as part of a push to enter talks to the war on Ukraine. That irked European Union allies who have long seen direct talks with Putin as a meaningless exercise.

During Macron’s call, the French president once again urged Putin to accept a cease-fire and engage in serious negotiation, according to a person familiar with the matter. Putin rejected that position. Putin said a settlement to the war must “address the root causes of the Ukrainian crisis, and be based on the new territorial realities,” according to the Kremlin statement.

Asked in 2023 why he’d stopped speaking with Putin - despite more than a dozen calls in 2022 - Macron said he didn’t see the point in doing so at that stage. The Kremlin has deepened its ties with Iran since Putin ordered the full-scale 2022 invasion of Ukraine and triggered Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II. 

Now, Iran is said to be cutting off communication with key UN watchdog officials, deepening uncertainty over the status of its nuclear program. Macron wants to coordinate with permanent members of the Security Council on pressing Iran to accept the return of International Atomic Energy Agency inspections, one of the people said. 

After formally ending inspections by the IAEA last week, Iranian nuclear-safety regulators have stopped taking calls from the Vienna-based agency. The IAEA’s Incident and Emergency Centre was activated after Israel’s June 13 attack and had been in continuous contact with counterparts in Iran, but that information sharing has tailed off, they said.

Iran has provided Russia with hundreds of combat drones used to attack targets in Ukraine. The US and Europe last year accused Tehran of supplying ballistic missiles to Moscow, though Tehran denied the allegation.