President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad criticised Russia on Sunday for supporting further UN Security Council sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme, the ISNA news agency reported.

"If I was in the place of Russian officials, I would adopt a more careful stance," the agency quoted him as saying after a cabinet meeting.

The United States this week succeeded in forging a compromise with the other four permanent members of the Security Council for a fourth round of sanctions against Iran for its defiance in refusing to halt uranium enrichment.

That process can be used to produce fuel for nuclear reactors, but in highly refined form, enriched uranium can be used to make an atomic weapon. Tehran denies charges by the big powers that it has a covert atomic arms programme.

Washington said that both Russia and China had backed a tough draft UN sanctions resolution against Iran.

It came a day after Brazil and Turkey -- non-permanent Security Council members -- signed a deal in Tehran for it to ship much of its low enriched uranium (LEU) abroad in exchange for fuel for a research reactor.

"We had expected that a friendly neighbouring state would defend the Tehran Declaration," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying of Russia on Sunday.

The fourth round of sanctions would expand an existing arms embargo, measures against Iran's banking sector and ban it from mining uranium and developing ballistic missiles overseas, according to a US official in New York.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Monday gave a cautious welcome to the Tehran accord.

"This is the politics of a diplomatic solution to the Iran problem," he said. "We need to have consultations with all the parties, including Iran, and then determine what to do next."

Russia is building Iran's first nuclear power plant in the city of Bushehr, where the facility is expected to go online by August regardless of any new UN sanctions against Tehran, a top Russian atomic official said on Thursday.

Construction of the Bushehr plant began in the mid-1990s, but its launch has been marred by a series of delays, not least the standoff over Iran's nuclear activities.

earlier related report
Sanctions will hurt Iran but not make it change course: analysts
Washington (AFP) May 21, 2010 - US President Barack Obama's administration has paved the way for new sanctions that will hurt Iran but will not likely force the Islamic Republic to curb its nuclear ambitions, analysts said.

After months of diplomacy, the United States managed last week to get China and Russia -- in addition to Britain and France -- to endorse a draft UN Security Council resolution for a fourth round of sanctions against Iran.

The move involving all five permanent council members was all the more dramatic as it came a day after Tehran sealed a deal with Turkey and Brazil to avoid more punishment by shipping about half of its nuclear fuel to Turkey.

However, Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a leading US think tank, said the US diplomatic coup amounts to only a qualified success.

"The good news is that the United States and the other four permanent veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council... have at long last agreed on a resolution that would inflict a new round of sanctions on Iran...," he said.

"The bad news is that there is nothing in recent history that suggests that modest sanctions such as those contained in the draft resolution ... will divert Iran's current leaders from their current path," Haas said.

Writing on the CFR website, Haas was airing Western fears that Iran -- which has long defied existing UN Security Council resolutions to halt uranium enrichment -- is seeking to build an atomic bomb. Iran denies the charge.

"This is not to suggest that this new step is meaningless," said Haas, a former director of policy planning at the Department of State.

"The fact that Iran... has spent much of the last week trying to derail this diplomatic effort with an alternative plan ... suggests that Iran did not want this new UN resolution to pass," he wrote.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday the Iranians seemed worried about a new sanctions resolution.

"If it were irrelevant as far as they were concerned, I don't think you'd see them expending the kind of diplomatic and other kinds of energy to try and prevent its passage," Gates said.

If and when the new UN resolution is adopted by the 15-member Security Council, analysts say, it will pave the way for separate sanctions from not only the United States, but also certain European Union (EU) countries.

"Alas, such sanctions .... also will probably fail to achieve their stated purpose," Haas said.

In the end, Haas fears the world will be faced with either having to live with an Iranian nuclear weapon through a policy of deterrence or with watching Israeli or US military strikes against Iran's nuclear sites.

The only events that could forestall such events, he said, would be "a change of heart" or change of government in Tehran.

Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, gave a similar bleak view.

"The UN sanctions are more politically than economically consequential for Iran, for they're a necessary precursor to amplified EU and US measures," Sadjadpour said in an email exchange with AFP.

"I don't think anyone is confident that sanctions will achieve their ostensible goal of compelling Iran to make meaningful and binding nuclear compromises," he said.

"That's not because sanctions won't be felt by Tehran, but because the Islamic Republic has long shown itself willing to subject its population to severe economic hardship rather than compromise on its political and ideological aims," he added.

Sadjadpour said it is not clear yet how tough the sanctions will be as the parties are debating asset freezes and travel bans for individuals and entities to be be contained in annexes.

"I think the meat of the resolution will be in the annexes, which is why they're still being hotly deliberated," Sadjadpour said.

State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told reporters Friday that "there's still work being done on the annexes" when asked for a progress report, but he gave no details.