Petro-rubles flowing freely, Putin’s Russia flexes dormant muscles.

Russian President Vladimir Putin put forward a proposal to break the deadlock over Iran’s nuclear programme during his landmark visit to the Islamic republic, Iranian officials said on Wednesday.

The announcement came as Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani revealed he would be holding his latest round of talks with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana to find a solution to the atomic standoff on Tuesday in Rome.

No further details were given on Putin’s proposal, which was made during his talks on Tuesday with Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“Putin put forward a special suggestion during his meeting with the supreme leader,” said Larijani, adding the details would be given at a later date.

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Russia — which is helping to build Tehran’s first nuclear power plant — has a long-standing proposal to carry out Iran’s controversial uranium enrichment activities on its soil, something that Tehran has rejected.

It was not clear if the new proposal was linked to this.

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Meanwhile, Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency are to hold new talks next week as part of their agreement to clarify the agency’s technical questions about the Iranian nuclear drive. Article

A little more:

Iran is serious about its program of enriching uranium but will cooperate with the U.N. nuclear watchdog and avoid adventurism, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told the visiting Russian president.

Khamenei made the comments during a meeting late Tuesday with President Vladimir Putin who presented the Iranian leader a proposal to solve the international standoff over Iran’s nuclear program which the U.S. and its allies believe is aimed at producing nuclear weapons.

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There are no official reports available on the contents of Putin’s message but officials close to hard-liners within the Iranian ruling Islamic establishment said the proposal could have been a “time-out” on sanctions if Tehran suspends uranium enrichment. Aticle

Looking at the near abroad from a regional perspective, this piece offers a reminder of Iran’s satus as a novice in public international relations.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has experienced profound geopolitical changes in its regional neighbors during a short period of time. Five new countries were created on its northern borders after the fall of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s. The occupation of Afghanistan in 2001 on its eastern borders and the following occupation of Iraq on its western borders in 2003 led to radical changes in the structure of the regional system surrounding Iran.

Despite these violent transformations on its borders and its ability to exploit contradictions in the region to enhance its national interests, Iran’s negotiating experience after the revolution - despite all of this - numbers only two instances.

The first took place through intermediaries, with Washington, after the 1980 Iranian hostage crisis in Tehran, while the second occurred in the negotiations with the former Iraqi regime after the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988.

Thus, negotiations with the European troika (Germany, France and the UK) represent the most important negotiation experience in history of revolutionary Iran, which for the first time experienced very complex negotiations that had interrelated political and legal dimensions, along with technical and security dimensions. At the time, there were differences between the Foreign Ministry and the Iranian Nuclear Energy Agency over three basic items: responsibility for managing the negotiations, policies to be carried out during various phases of the negotiations, and setting negotiating priorities.

The former chief Iranian negotiator, Hassan Rouhani, revealed that these differences grew when the International Atomic Energy Agency asked for permission to inspect nuclear facilities. The Iranian Atomic Energy Agency did not give much importance to the request, while the Foreign Ministry felt the matter involved considerably more danger.

In short, Tehran realized that the complexity and importance of the negotiations required high-level official representation, and not allowing the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency to handle the negotiations alone. Since then, the center of Iranian decision-making on the nuclear issue has not been limited to the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency on Karkar street (Tehran’s biggest street, which extends from the metro station at the south to the north, in Amirabad).

In the middle of 2003, for the first time in the history of Iran’s nuclear program, responsibility for negotiations were transferred to Iran’s National Security Council and saw Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency become a mere junior partner in a process that featured interconnected technical and legal dimensions, behind the political and security considerations.

The National Security Council inherited the prerogatives of its predecessor, the Higher Council for National Defense, which was established in 1979, by virtue of Article 110 of the Iranian Constitution that followed the revolution. At the time it was made up of seven people: the president of the Republic, the prime minister, the minister of defense, the chief of staff, the general commander of the Republican Guards, and two advisors to the spiritual guide of the Republic. After the Constitution was amended in 1989 to match the change at the top after the death of Imam Khomeini and his succession by Sayyed Ali Khameini, the Council’s situation changed as well. This was because the spiritual guide of the Republic sits atop the head of power in the Islamic Republic of Iran, enjoying constitutional and executive powers that are too many to count. Thus, not only was the name of the body changed, to become the National Security Council, but its prerogatives and number of members were increased as well. Since then, the following members have been added: the head of the judicial authority, the head of the Council for Safeguarding the Constitution, the foreign minister, the minister of intelligence, the minister of interior, and the finance minister (chairman of the Budget and Planning Committee).

The spiritual guide of the republic dominates the NSC through constitutional prerogatives that give him the right to appoint the NSC’s secretary, giving him control over the majority of members. The spiritual guide is also the only party that grants the NSC the ability to implement the decisions it takes; the Iranian Constitution stipulates his approval of the NSC’s decisions for them to take effect.

The National Security Council has the power to vote on important state decisions, with many more constitutional prerogatives than those granted to the Iranian Parliament. Therefore, the Council resembles a “Higher Parliament.” This group of people is managing the Iranian nuclear issue and has the decision-making power - with a disparate share of prerogatives - and carries out the directives of the spiritual guide of the Republic in this regard.

In other words, the office of the spiritual guide of the Republic undertakes the strategic planning for decision-making related to nuclear power, while the National Security Council carries out planning related to administrative matters and implementation.

This basic foundation hasn’t changed in the two phases of negotiations carried out by Iran, in the Khatami-Rouhani and Ahmadinejad-Larijani eras. However, the mechanism of decision-making by the National Security Council has changed, keeping up with the sudden change in negotiating positions and regional and international conditions. Article