Russia, China to stop ‘sabotage’ of Iran deal

BEIJING: China and Russia will block any attempts to "sabotage" the Iran nuclear agreement, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday, as US President Donald Trump mulls whether to scrap the deal.

Trump has set a May 12 deadline to "fix" the 2015 accord, which curbs Tehran’s nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief and was the fruit of intense diplomacy involving the US, European powers, Russia and China.

"There are attempts to interfere with the international order upon which the United Nations depends," Lavrov said after talks with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Beijing. "We said clearly with China that we will stop attempts to sabotage these agreements that were passed in a UN Security Council resolution," Lavrov said.

He was speaking on the eve of a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a regional security bloc spearheaded by Moscow and Beijing. Calling the Iran agreement "one of the biggest achievements in international diplomacy in recent times", Lavrov said that "revising this document is unacceptable".