World powers holding a new round of nuclear talks with Iran starting next week are divided by another issue of geopolitical importance: the crisis in Ukraine.
Tensions between Russia and the West are mounting over the Russian military takeover of the Crimean Peninsula, with the United States and European countries threatening to impose sanctions.
Foreign policy experts, however, say the Ukraine crisis is unlikely to fracture the international alliance in nuclear talks with Iran. The stakes in keeping Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon are simply too high for Russia to use the issue as leverage against the West, they say.
“I don’t think they [Russia] would like to see a new Islamic nuclear empire rising to their south,” said Eldad Pardo, an Iran expert at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute
The next round of talks between Iran and the six major powers — Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States — begins March 17 in Vienna.
For Russian President Vladimir Putin, the key consideration in the talks is the threat of fundamentalist Islam that Russia perceived in its south and on its southern borders, said Michael Adler, an Iran scholar at The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.
“Russia is worried about the expanding influence of fundamentalist Islam in the region, and Iran can be a vector for that,” he said. “The idea that that vector can become nuclear is totally unacceptable.”
Adler suggested that Russia may become more aggressive in seeking to work around the tough U.S. sanctions on Iran but was unlikely to abandon its commitment to U.N. Security Council sanctions.
“Russia is not happy with bilateral sanctions but has not backed off from multilateral sanctions,” he said. “Russia wants to make problems, but at every point when it comes to the U.N. sanctions, Russia has closed ranks.”
 “Russians don’t want that kind of nuclear proliferation in their neighborhood,” Nader said. “This is a national security issue for them.”