MOSCOW: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday (Jun 26) spoke out against Moscow's key ally Iran suspending cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), after Iranian lawmakers voted in favour of halting work with the United Nations nuclear agency.

The Kremlin said on Wednesday that it thought it was too early for anyone to have a realistic picture of damage inflicted on Iran's nuclear facilities by U.S. airstrikes. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was responding to a question about damage assessments offered by President Donald Trump who has suggested that the U.

John Ratcliffe, the US spy agency's director, said key sites had been destroyed, though he stopped short of declaring that Iran's nuclear programme had been eliminated outright. It comes a day after a leaked preliminary assessment from a Pentagon intelligence agency suggested core components of Iran's nuclear programme remained intact after the US bombings.