Russia said Thursday that it will start up a nuclear reactor it is building at Iran's Bushehr plant in the summer, drawing immediate criticism from visiting Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who officials said still hopes that Moscow will support new U.N. sanctions on Tehran.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced the Russian decision just hours after Mrs. Clinton arrived in Moscow, though it was not entirely unexpected given that the $1 billion Iranian-Russian contract has suffered a series of delays since it was first signed in 1995.
"The first reactor at Iran's nuclear power plant in Bushehr is to be launched already in the summer," Mr. Putin was reported as saying by Russian news agencies during a visit to the southern city of Volgodonsk.
Mrs. Clinton, who is scheduled to meet with both Mr. Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday, said their plan was not a good idea and urged them to further postpone the reactor's launch.
"Iran is entitled to civil nuclear power. It is a nuclear weapons program that it is not entitled to. And if it reassures the world, or if its behavior is changed because of international sanctions, then they can pursue peaceful, civil nuclear power," she said at a press conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
"In the absence of those reassurances, we think it would be premature to go forward with any project at this time, because we want to send an unequivocal message to the Iranians," she added.
Mr. Lavrov, however, quickly rejected Mrs. Clinton's call, saying that Bushehr "plays a special role in maintaining" the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) presence at the plant and "ensuring that Iran is complying with its nonproliferation obligations."
"The project will be completed, and now we have entered a final phase of technological preparations," he said.
The IAEA has issued several critical reports of Iran's failure to come clean on its nuclear ambitions in recent years, and Western diplomats and nonproliferation experts are not sure Russia's project will make a significant difference.
