Khamenei: Uranium Must Stay in Iran; Abandoning Enrichment “100% Against Interests”
Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has issued a directive that the country’s near-weapons-grade uranium must remain inside Iran. Khamenei also said abandoning uranium enrichment would be “100 percent against the country’s national interest”. The directive directly rejects the central US demand — that Iran hand over its highly enriched uranium to the United States — and contradicts even the conditional proposal Iran floated this week to dilute some of the stockpile and send the rest to Russia with a right to “reclaim it”. Iran has separately warned it may enrich uranium to 90% purity (weapons-grade) if it faces another military attack.
The Khamenei directive lands twenty-four hours after Vice President JD Vance told a White House press briefing that the United States and Iran had made “a lot of progress” in their talks and that “neither side wants to see a resumption of the military campaign”, and twenty-four hours after President Trump said he had been “an hour away” from ordering the cancelled US strike. The Wall Street Journal separately reported on Tuesday that Iran is currently unable to enrich uranium because the fissile material is buried under rubble from the June 2025 12-Day War strikes on Natanz, Fordow and Esfahan — meaning the operational stake of the directive is the post-rebuild scenario, not the immediate one. The Institute for the Study of War continues to assess the two sides’ positions as “fundamentally incompatible”; the Pakistani-mediated channel via Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi’s Tuesday Tehran visit remains the active diplomatic track.