Dear Mr. Chairman,

We are grateful to Director General and the Department of Safeguards of the IAEA Secretariat for the verification activities in Iran. We have carefully read the published report of the Director General "NPT Safeguards Agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran" and in this regard would like to note the following.

We welcome the exchange of letters initiated by Director General with new President of Iran Masoud Pezeshkian with a proposal to continue the interaction resumed with the previous administration. We hope that soon the mutual interest in this will find practical implementation. We also note Director General's readiness to travel to Tehran at a time convenient for both parties in the interests of establishing a constructive, results-oriented dialogue.

We urge Western countries to exercise restraint in this regard, not to make any sudden moves, and to allow the Director General and the Iranian side to build a process without outside pressure.

Dear Mr. Chairman,

On a positive note, we would like to note the fact that this time we did not find in the report a reference to "public statements in Iran about the ability to produce a nuclear warhead". Our position remains unchanged - this element has nothing to do with the application of safeguards in Iran, much less with the correctness and completeness of its safeguards declarations.

At the same time, we cannot help but comment on the problematic aspects of the report. First of all, this is the discrepancy in the accounting of nuclear material in the Iranian JHL laboratory during the experiment with metallic uranium in 1995-2000. Once again, the Agency is "stepping on the same rake". We are dealing with a thirty-year-old issue. In our opinion, the Secretariat needs to stop the vicious practice of "digging" deeper into history and reviving more and more ancient stories about the Iranian nuclear program. This is simply counterproductive.

Let us recall that during the traditional informal briefing for Member States before the current session of the Board, representatives of the Secretariat "revealed" the amount of discrepancy – just over 30 kg of natural uranium. Is this a lot or a little? As an illustration, we note that in IAEA terminology, a "significant quantity" sufficient to produce a nuclear explosive device, in natural uranium equivalent, is 10 tons.

In addition, thirty-year-old issues have no bearing on the implementation of safeguards in Iran today and do not carry proliferation risks. Such purely technical issues should be subject to bilateral settlement between the Secretariat and the member state, as is done with all other countries, and not included in reports.

We regret to note that Director General's documents continue to include the story of Iran's withdrawal of accreditation from a number of Agency inspectors. We believe that if the Secretariat claims to present a neutral, factual presentation of information related to this topic, it would be fair to reflect in the text the fact that over the past year Iran has accredited 15 new inspectors, who have been gaining the necessary experience for a year now. At the same time, in our opinion, it is time to turn this page, which is unpleasant, but not critical from the point of view of the application of safeguards.

In conclusion, we would like to once again call on all countries of the Board of Governors to give the IAEA Director General and the Iranian leadership the opportunity to establish a productive and meaningful dialogue without harmful interference. In our opinion, this will be the best demonstration of trust in Director General and his efforts.

Thank you, esteemed Mr. Chairman.