In an interview with President Maduro after arriving in Tehran for a two-day visit, Iranian state media reported late Friday that Maduro welcomed Iran’s move to send fuel tankers to its energy-thirsty nation. “Tehran’s delivery of oil to Caracas has been a great help to the Venezuelan people,” he said. Maduro’s first visit to Iran comes amid tensions across the Middle East over the collapse of Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers. US sanctions and rising world food prices are drowning out Iran’s troubled economy, putting further pressure on its government and people. A high-level political and economic delegation from Venezuela – which, like Iran, is under heavy US sanctions – accompanies Maduro on his visit, at the invitation of hardline President Ebrahim Raisi. At a joint news conference Saturday, Raisi and Maduro signed a 20-year agreement to expand ties to the oil and petrochemical industries, the military and the economy. The Iranian-language PressTV reported that Maduro said before the press conference that the two men would meet to discuss “the need to inform the nations of Iran and Venezuela well about the sanctions war and to find ways to deal with them with stability.” ». Maduro said Venezuela and Iran share a “common vision” for international affairs and are both victims of coercion by the United States and its allies. “Caracas and Tehran have formulated their (a) resistance economy strategy and are working to expand it,” he said. On his website, Khamenei said that the successful experience of the two countries showed that the only way to deal with US pressures and wars is to “resist.” He thanked Maduro and the Venezuelan people for their resistance, saying “today the United States sees Venezuela differently. Maduro is on a tour of Eurasia after President Joe Biden decided not to invite him to the US Summit, which began on Thursday. His stops earlier this week included Algeria and Turkey. Turkey is one of the few places in the world – including Russia and Iran – where Maduro is welcomed amid US sanctions on his country. Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua were not invited to the summit by the Biden government because of their authoritarianism and human rights abuses. This decision led the President of Mexico to announce that he will not attend. Rice praised Maduro as a leader “who has shown a policy of fighting imperialism and has achieved a good position by overcoming sanctions and threats.” Maduro announced that a direct flight between Tehran and Caracas would begin next month. The semi-official Tasnim news agency later reported that Iran had delivered the Aframax-2 oil tanker to Venezuelan officials, the second of four ships Iran had undertaken to build for the South American country. Amid growing tensions with the West, Iran has begun removing 27 surveillance cameras from nuclear facilities across the country, the head of the UN Atomic Observatory said on Thursday. He warned that this could deal a “fatal blow” to the trivial nuclear deal as Tehran enriches uranium closer than ever to weapons quality levels. This development came a day after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board criticized Tehran for failing to provide “reliable information” about fabricated nuclear material found at three undeclared sites in the country. The Iranian currency fell to its lowest level ever after the reprimand – at 327,500 rials per dollar.
