The UN Security Council has rejected another last-ditch effort to delay the reimposition of sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program a day before the deadline and after Western countries claimed that weeks of meetings failed to result in a "concrete" agreement. The resolution put forth by Russia and China  Iran's most powerful and closest allies on the 15-member council failed to garner support on Friday from the nine countries required to halt the series of UN sanctions from taking effect Saturday, as outlined in Iran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.

"We had hoped that European colleagues and the US would think twice, and they would opt for the path of diplomacy and dialogue instead of their clumsy blackmail, which merely results in escalation of the situation in the region," Dmitry Polyanskiy, the deputy Russian ambassador to the UN, said during the meeting. Barring an eleventh-hour deal, the reinstatement of sanctions " triggered by Britain, France and Germany " will once again freeze Iranian assets abroad, halt arms deals with Tehran and penalize any development of Iran's ballistic missile programme, among other measures. That will further squeeze the country's reeling economy. In an interview Friday afternoon, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian called the decision "unfair, unjust and illegal".