Tehran: The European Union on Monday said it is ready to hold talks with Iran at Tehran's request to try and resolve the standoff over the country's controversial nuclear programme.
By blending cunning diplomacy with threats of retaliation, Iran is hoping it can kill off the Western efforts to send its disputed nuclear programme to the UN Security Council this week.
Along with France and Germany, Britain had hoped Iran would jump at an offer of trade and other incentives and voluntarily limit nuclear fuel work that could be diverted to making weapons.
On Thursday, the IAEA is due to hold talks that may refer Iran to the UN Security Council. The US and EU fear that Tehran's nuclear programme will be used to make nuclear bombs.
But on Sunday Iran insisted, the only solution to its nuclear dispute with the West was negotiations rather than referral of its atomic dossier to the UN Security Council.
"Sending Iran's case to the Security Council or even informing the Security Council will definitely lead to a setback in the Islamic Republic of Iran's voluntary cooperation with the IAEA," Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said.
The Islamic republic, diplomats and analysts say, is piling on the pressure on all fronts playing on fears of yet more turmoil in the Middle East and soaring oil prices, and shifting its diplomatic focus towards Russia and China.
"It's hard to think of another government which is harder to negotiate with," British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw commented on Saturday, acknowledging the hardline clerical regime was proving a gritty foe."
Iran's regime, which last year made a shift to the right with the election of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has rejected such a deal and steadily been pulling out of an accord with the EU-3 under which it froze nuclear fuel cycle activities.
The president has also played up Iranian clout in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories in what Western diplomats have dubbed a display of the Islamic republic's "capacity for nuisance".
Iran is now embracing an idea from Moscow for its uranium to be enriched on Russian soil seen as a way of preventing the Islamic republic from acquiring bomb-making technology but also guaranteeing its access to nuclear energy.
(With AFP inputs)
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