Khamenei Says Iran Won’t Bow to Pressure Over Nuclear Program

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Iran will not bow to foreign pressure or sanctions.

Khamenei spoke yesterday as Iranian and European Union officials met in Istanbul in an attempt to establish common ground for another round of international talks on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. Those talks will be followed by contact between EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Saeed Jalili, Iran’s chief negotiator, Ashton’s office said yesterday, without giving details of the talks.

The U.S. and its allies have raised concerns that Iran is concealing a nuclear-weapons program, a charge Iran rejects, and have imposed a series of sanctions against the country.

“The enemies explicitly say that by intensifying the pressure and the sanctions, they are seeking to force Iranian officials to reconsider their calculations,” Khamenei was quoted as saying in Tehran yesterday by the state-run Fars news agency. “In reality, we will not rethink our calculations, and we will continue to trod the path of the Iranian nation more resolutely.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Yeganeh Salehi in Dubai at yalehi@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andrew J. Barden at barden@bloomberg.net