US releases details of initial deal with Iran

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1:19Alon Ben Dah-veed:Hello to you. Welcome to News Out from the BBC World Service. We're coming to you live from London. I'm Sean Lay. The United States has released details of what it says is the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran due to be signed in Lucerne in Switzerland on Friday. Speaking at the G7 summit he's been attending in France, President Donald Trump insisted he was prepared to resume hostilities if Tehran deviates from the agreement. Nonetheless, what's been briefed out to journalists suggests the two sides have provisionally found common ground. Iran agrees to open the Strait of Hormuz without charging a toll for ships using it, at least not for 60 days.

2:00Alon Ben Dah-veed:After that, it will discuss what happens with Gulf neighbours. Iran says it won't procure or develop nuclear weapons, but short of the US demand for its stockpile of enriched uranium to be removed from the country, it will be diluted in situ under international supervision. President Trump's critics have questioned whether a deal with Iran now will be any better than what was known as the JCPOA, an agreement signed when Barack Obama was president. This is what he told US network ABC on Sunday. It is doubtful that any agreement that arises is going to be significantly different or a significant improvement from the deal that we had in the first place and had worked for a long stretch of time before we, the United States, pulled out of it.

2:57Alon Ben Dah-veed:Barack Obama. Well, at an end-of-Summit news conference at the G7 on Wednesday, just before he headed to Versailles for dinner with President Macron, where he's just arrived, Donald Trump had more to say about the prospects for the talks with Iran, which will follow the signing of the memorandum. On Sunday we reached an agreement with Iran that achieves everything we set out to accomplish, everything and much more. Ending the current conflict, reopening the Strait of Hormuz and preventing Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon. That's what it was all about. That was about 99%. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.

3:35They can't develop it, buy it.

3:37Alon Ben Dah-veed:They can never have a nuclear weapon. And the president insisted that U.S. military action had effectively achieved regime change in Iran. They have a new group of leaders that I think is, actually, I think they're smarter. I think they're very smart. I think they're far less radicalized. And I think they're, I think they're really good. They love their country. I mean, you know, you talk about regime change. Nobody will say that, but I guess that's, look, one set of leaders is all gone. The second set of leaders is all gone. Their third set of leaders is a little bit gone, but for the most part, and frankly, I think that's regime change.

4:21I think they're going to behave much differently. I think they see a different way of life.

4:25Alon Ben Dah-veed:Well, before we came on air, I spoke to the BBC's diplomatic correspondent, Paul Adams. We do now have a pretty good idea, at least as far as the Americans are concerned, what this document consists of. And it is very much as expected. You know, it will see the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the lifting of America's naval blockade. But after that, it starts to get interesting, I think, to say the least. I think many critics will argue that Iran will stand to benefit to the tune of many billions of dollars without having to give up really anything of significance on the nuclear fire, the very issue which triggered this war in the first place.

5:05because we will see almost immediately the America giving waivers to allow Iran to sell its oil. That will begin immediately. As the negotiations proceed over the subsequent 60 days, we will see the gradual lifting, depending on America's view of how the talks are going, the gradual unfreezing of Iranian assets to the tune of in excess of$100 billion. dollars. Sanctions will stay in place and they will only be lifted once a final deal is done. But all Iran has to do on the nuclear front is to give an upfront pledge not to pursue or develop

5:45Alon Ben Dah-veed:a nuclear weapon. Didn't they do that in the JCPOA agreed under the Obama administration, which President Trump walked away from? It is a pledge that the Iranians have made several times and probably in the negotiations that involved the Trump team last year and earlier this year too. It's a pledge which in some ways is kind of meaningless because as circumstances change, so apparently does Iran's strategy. After Donald Trump took the US out of the JCPOA, the Iranians after a while started to enrich uranium to dangerously high levels. So, you know, all of these things have happened in the past.

6:27Look, I think what we've got is a deal that will stop the war. It'll be a permanent end to the war, by the way, on all fronts. That includes Lebanon, and that is another issue. But that leaves all the really tricky stuff for a very, very difficult set of negotiations to come. We kind of knew that already. But the fact that Iran will benefit from a lot of financial relief as the process unfolds, I think that is interesting.

6:53Alon Ben Dah-veed:BBC diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams. The country in the Middle East that potentially has the most to lose if the United States succeeds in getting a final deal with Iran is Israel. Just three months ago, America and Israel were in lockstep as they launched attacks on Iran. Israel also went after Hezbollah, seen as an Iranian proxy in Lebanon. But more than once this week, President Trump has publicly rebuked the strategy pursued by Israel and its long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And Iran, with its regime still intact, and able freely to export and sell its oil, could shift the balance of power in the Middle East.

7:28Alon Ben Dah-veed:I've been speaking to senior military correspondent Alon Ben David, who works for Israel's Channel 13. I think this Memorandum of Understanding could represent a dramatic shift in balance of power in the region. Until today, Israel was the leading power in the region. All countries were quoting Israel for its technology, for its knowledge, for its military power. where right now what we are seeing is a shift because this memorandum allows Iran to earn lots of money that would allow them to reconstruct their military capabilities and project power way beyond their borders, on the whole of the Persian Gulf and over to the rest of the Middle East.

8:10So I think that the region is turning eastbound and starting to look at Iran as the major power in the region, as the country that stood up to the world's greatest power and sustained the war.

8:24Alon Ben Dah-veed:The United States administration argues that this deal effectively means that Iran is being brought into line on the international community's terms, that they don't see it as a in any way strength Iran, they see it as bringing Iran under control. Look, if I go back to February this year, Iran was a pariah state. Its regime was outcasted by the international community after butchering thousands of its people. It was weak. It wasn't projecting power. It was a country that no one wanted to deal with. And right now, this brutal regime gains legitimacy from the world's greatest power and gains perhaps some control over the international waterway of the Hormuz trade.

9:05So what we are seeing is a major shift here now. I don't know for certain if Iran will be able to collect fees from passing through the straits, which would be a problematic international precedent.

9:17Alon Ben Dah-veed:Let me interrupt you there because we have some briefing that has apparently come out of Washington suggesting that there will be no charge for 60 days between the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman and vice versa. and that there would then be a discussion between Iran and other Gulf states and Oman on what happened next. In other words, the implication of that is that FISA would only be the case where there was an agreement which involved Iran and its neighbours. Once Iran will be allowed again to export oil, will gain its frozen assets around the world, Iran would start to have revenues of dozens of billions of dollars per year.

9:58That would enable them to reconstruct their military power, and they will be allowed to maintain some nuclear capabilities, enrichment capability, enriched uranium to a certain level. That means that there will be a threshold state. Now, in February, we might have gotten a better deal in the Geneva talks, but looking at it now, we're getting a more bolstered regime with the motivation to avenge the death of the previous supreme leader. And I suspect it's bad news for the Middle East. Where does it leave Israel? Alone, to stand against Iran. Iran has no limitations so far that we heard of about supporting its proxies in the region.

10:39That means Hezbollah, that means the Houthis in Yemen, that means Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. So all of its proxies, they were destabilizing the region for more than a decade. We'd be getting new support, new money. We'd be able to rebuild their military capabilities. and I suspect that we're getting a much more unstable Middle East instead of what we had before the war. What can Israel do about this? Not much, I'm afraid. Once we have gone in partnership with the Americans through this war, we are very limited with what they decide now. It's hard for me to envision that in 60 days the parties will be able to draft a serious agreement that would limit Iran's nuclear capabilities, but nobody's talking about ballistic missiles.

11:24In fact, President Trump just said Iran is allowed to hold ballistic missiles. So we are getting a major shift in the strategic balance of the Middle East. And it's not in Israel's favor. And I suspect most of the Gulf countries would start to look differently at Iran, knowing that it's the most serious power around them. Kuwait, Qatar, Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, all of them would like to have better relations with Iran. And this regime, at the end of the day, is not a regime that wishes well for the region. It's a regime that wishes to export its revolution, the Islamic revolution, to the region.

12:03So in my eyes, we are going to have a much more unstabilized Middle East.

12:08Alon Ben Dah-veed:How does this compare with what President Obama signed the JCPOA with Iran back in 2015? Well, JCPOA wasn't a perfect deal, but it was a serious deal. It was made by experts. It was very detailed. And everything was anchored in very strong inspection for what Iran is doing. Yeah, but Prime Minister Netanyahu was cheering when President Trump in his first term took America out of that deal. I think that was a strategic mistake by Israel. We had a deal that kept Iran away from nuclear capabilities for 15 years. It wasn't perfect. It wasn't great. But 15 years in the Middle East is a long time. pulling out of the deal.

12:52We are now getting something much less than the JCPOA of 2015. I do not see how the Americans are intending to employ inspections or rigging inspections on the Iranians. And I suspect that Iran is going to be a threshold state and with its ambition to avenge the death of its leader, its conclusion might be that it might run towards a bomb, that it needs a bomb to defend itself after what it went through in the last year. So I don't know, we might wake up one morning to an Iran conducting a nuclear experiment in the desert somewhere and we'd be faced with effect, just like we had with North Korea, for example.

13:32Alon Ben Dah-veed:That's Alon Ben-David, senior military correspondent at Channel 13 in Israel. Well, President Donald Trump says the US agreement with Iran will be signed shortly and that could be on Thursday. The president has just arrived for dinner Wednesday night with the host of the G7 summit, President Macron. That dinner is being held at the Palace of Versailles. Versailles is 500 kilometres from Lucerne, the Swiss city, where we were told that the Iran-US Memorandum of Understanding would be signed. You're listening to News Out from the BBC World Service.

14:11Alon Ben Dah-veed:Russian drivers are feeling the effects of a shortage of fuel for their vehicles as a result of the war with Ukraine. Drone attacks on both refineries and tankers have reduced availability. Kiev also appears to be disrupting Russian supplies in Crimea, a Ukrainian region annexed by Moscow 12 years ago. Stephanie Baker of Bloomberg is the author of Punishing Putin Inside the Global Economic War to Bring Down Russia. And I asked Stephanie just how bad fuel shortages are getting in Crimea. I think it is bad. The recent strikes are increasingly focused on the broader logistics network in Crimea rather than just military assets.

14:51So the Ukrainian drone campaign has struck multiple roads, bridges, depots and fuel tankers and trucks moving through that land corridor between Russia and Crimea. That has resulted in severe fuel shortages. You know, reports that people need to get a QR code from the government app Max in order to be able to buy fuel with like long waiting lines. So it's having an impact as well as really turning away the Russian tourists who go there regularly in the summer.

15:23Alon Ben Dah-veed:And when you say that the focus is on the land link between Crimea and Russia, does this mean that now some tanker drivers kind of don't want to do the job or don't want to risk driving fuel up and down that link? Well, I think traffic on those routes has dropped. And I think the strategy is to make those routes unsafe, not just for military supplies, but fuel supplies and cut off Crimea. It's a deliberate strategy to isolate the peninsula. And it's something that Kirill Budanov, Ukraine's head of military intelligence, told me in an interview a couple of years ago that they saw that they had an asymmetric advantage by attacking that land corridor.

16:02And I think now they've been able to do it more systematically because of the growth of Ukrainian drone production and capabilities. And it is having an impact and forcing Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, to try to dismiss the reports of fuel shortages. He's blamed it on panic buying, but the reports on social media are very real.

16:23Alon Ben Dah-veed:And the vulnerability of Crimea, is that really geographical as much as anything else? Or has Russia, in a sense, neglected to protect a part of Ukraine, which it annexed more than a decade ago now? It's mostly down to the geography and the fact that it doesn't have oil production or refining capacity itself. So it's quite easy to isolate the peninsula. Of course, there have been fuel shortages reported across Russia and other regions. Russia has imposed a gasoline export ban through the summer because of those shortages. And that really stems from Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian refineries across the country.

17:01Crimea carries a symbolic value and a military strategic value for Russia. They use it as a staging ground and a military supply route for other Russian-occupied regions in Ukraine. So I think they view that as important to undermine Russia's campaign elsewhere in eastern Ukraine.

17:20Alon Ben Dah-veed:Some of the international pressure on Russia over its oil exports has eased a little as a result of the Iranian war as countries in Europe and the United States, for example, want to keep oil exports flowing. But domestic supply for Russians themselves, if that's starting to become a weakness, how vulnerable does that make the kind of war effort in Russia? I mean, it's quite stark because Russia is one of the largest oil producers and the world is now reportedly planning on importing gasoline this summer. So I think it really does bring home the costs of this war to the Russian people, that this is causing a huge amount of disruption and hitting their economy, that they should not be having to block gasoline exports because of the shortages and the problems that they're experiencing at refineries.

18:12So, you know, I think it's definitely having an impact and potentially undermining Putin's ability to sustain the war.

18:19Alon Ben Dah-veed:That's Stephanie Baker from Bloomberg, who's the author of the book Putin's War. This is News Out from the BBC World Service. Do please stay with us.

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20:11Alon Ben Dah-veed:Welcome back to News Out. Ghana is hosting a major conference on reparatory justice. This follows a landmark UN resolution back in March which declared the trafficking and enslavement of Africans the gravest crime against humanity. Leaders, historians and legal experts from more than 80 countries are meeting in the Ghanaian capital, Accra, to discuss next steps, including restitution and reparations. Liliane Umabaye is a co-founder and director of the African Futures Lab, an NGO focused on racial injustice. I think what the government of Ghana is proposing and putting in motion, I would say the first thing is to say it should be a multilateral effort.

20:52It's not one country bringing that agenda. It's different countries from the global south, different actors from civil society, civil society, different institutions, academic institutions, cultural institutions. So I think that's the first effort I would say to say this is a global movement. It's not just like one country or one effort, bilateral effort between a former colonial country or former colonized country. The second thing is to be very much concrete on what could that reparation agenda look like if we have to look at the issue of financial compensation, if we have to look at the restitutions, if we have to look at what kind of structural reforms that we can put in place, if we have to look at the guarantees of non-reputation to make sure that these crimes don't happen again.

21:52And then I think it's, yeah.