Putin Agrees to Help Trump Broker Nuclear Talks With Iran: Bloomberg Exclusive
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Now to a story that just crossed the Bloomberg terminal moments ago on a red headline. Russia agreeing to assist the Trump administration in communications with Iran on issues including its nuclear program and support for regional proxies opposed to the U.S. We're told the president relayed that interest directly in a phone call last month to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Golnar Multivali heads Bloomberg's Iran coverage.

and broke this story. Golnar is here with us now. Get us up to speed on just what we have learned about this phone call, which interestingly, according to your reporting, Golnar, came before U.S. and Russian negotiators met in Saudi Arabia last month. Is that right?

Yes, so this was also held by our colleagues who are covering Russia very closely. And people who they spoke with based in Moscow, these are sources, said that during...

the US first round of talks with Russian counterparts in Riyadh. There was apparently an ask on behalf of the Trump administration for President Putin's government to get involved on some level with President Trump's desire or stated interest

in brokering some kind of nuclear agreement with Iran. And apparently this request was then also repeated during a meeting between Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Al-Archi, when he then subsequently flew to Tehran for bilateral talks. So the crux of the story is that President Donald Trump

wants Putin's help on some level to broker engagement with Iran with a view to then securing a new nuclear agreement. But the agreement apparently won't just...

cover Iran's nuclear program, which is what the Obama administration had already broken in 2015. But as we know, Trump exited in 2018 and effectively jettisoned. But he wants a deal that also in some way covers Iran's support for its allied groups, such as Hamas and Hezbollah,

in the Middle East. And this is something that would be, you know, it would be a major development in the ongoing saga that is Iran and U.S. relations. But

The background to this, obviously, is that crucially, Trump is sending some mixed messages on what he wants to do with Iran. Because we know, obviously, on the day that he signed his directive reviving that maximum pressure strategy on Iran and broadening sanctions on its oil industry within hours, he also said

that he would, on his social website, he said that he was very much interested in a nuclear deal with Iran and he wants those talks to happen, quote unquote, immediately. So there's a lot going on here with this story.

Do we have any indication, Golnar, about how Israel might feel about a development like this? Because haven't Russia and Iran increased cooperation over the last several years? Yes, they have. That's another question.

crucial layers to this? And it's a great question, because since Russia started its invasion of Ukraine, the relationship between Tehran and Moscow has deepened and broadened significantly. They are two of the most sanctioned countries in the world. So they're the two most sanctioned countries by the U.S. Treasury.

And that has kind of brought them closer together. They're doing much more trade. They're doing more barter agreements together since Putin's invasion of Ukraine started. They're also...

They've also signed agreements to start trade corridors, a kind of very ambitious project to develop a very substantial trade corridor linking the Caspian Sea to the northern Indian Ocean using Iran as the throughway.

Lots going on there. And of course, Iran's military support, purported military support of Moscow in the shape of thousands of Iranian, cheaply made Iranian drones. That's another dimension to this. And as you said, Iran is de facto locked in a shadow war with Israel. It's said that it's going to continue fighting, especially in light of the Hamas attack.

on Israel in October 7th and the subsequent Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip and southern Hezbollah targeting, sorry, southern Lebanon targeting Hezbollah and Hamas. So that's also possibly a play here. It's going to be interesting to see how Trump squares

that circle, his kind of extremely close and sort of unconditional support for Israel with his desire to, according to what he said on his true social account, to have a verified nuclear peace agreement with Iran that doesn't involve any kind of military confrontation with Iran.

Thank you for this.

director of the Alfred Taubman Center for Politics and Policy at Brown University. And, Wendy, this news of President Trump's call with Putin is coming on top of the president halting military aid to Ukraine until we're told President Volodymyr Zelensky shows that he's committed to peace. Your reaction to all these developments this morning?

Well, Trump is disrupting again and disrupting the world order again. But this, you know, this is not that unpredictable. You know, when he undid the Iran deal, he kept saying this is a bad deal. You know, we struck a bad deal. We didn't get enough for it. There isn't enough reassurance.

Plus, it was a prior president, Obama, and he wanted to undo it and do it again, similar to what he did with NAFTA and renegotiated that and retitled it. You know, this is a guy that wants to get done things that prior presidents didn't do. We know that approval ratings are important to him, but we also know that he wants to be seen as an effective president. It's driving his...

everything he's trying to do. People may disagree with what he's doing, but this is what he wants to do. So if he can manage, I mean, Iran's pretty close. I'm not a nuclear expert, but they have gotten closer to getting a nuclear bomb. So if he can prevent that somehow and reduce some of Iranians'

energy and support for terrorist groups, he will claim credit for that. And he wants to build a record. Whether he wants to be president again, we don't know. But he wants to do what other presidents have not been able to do. And he sees Russia as a potential ally to get that done.

whether that's a reliable ally for us in all measures. And Russia and Iran, these sanctions, you know, we can argue whether they matter or they don't, whether they hurt Russia or they don't, but certainly economically they get in the way. And so I think both Russia and Iran would like to see these sanctions reduced or eliminated somehow. Trump will try to claim that he's not doing that, but obviously that's going to have to be on the table if there's any new agreement. Is this closer to full U.S. realignment with Russia?

I don't think anybody should jump the gun on that. Trump is not someone who aligns with anybody but Trump. This is the way he rolls. He's been very candid about this. Trump does what Trump thinks is in Trump's best interest. And right now as president, he's making the argument that these are all things that are in the United States' interest.

So whether he's looking for some longstanding alliance or not, whether, you know, we're trying to balance against China, you know, we have no idea. Normally we'd say, oh, this is part of some grand strategy, but it's not. It's Trump being able to broker deals. He loves to do that. Walk away and claim a win. And he's doing that across the board.

And right now, he doesn't see the utility in making Russia the enemy. He doesn't see the utility in basically paying U.S. weapons manufacturers, by the way, to make weapons for Ukraine and getting nothing for the deal. He wants something from Ukraine. He's trying to get some stake in minerals and natural resources in Ukraine, which might prove to be a bulwark against further Russia incursion in Ukraine if the United States has...

has a vested stake in their territory. So this is the way he thinks, and it's on brand for him. We're going to see if he explains it or talks about it tonight in his joint address. The president did say on Truth Social he's going to tell it like it is tonight before Congress. What will you be listening for this evening? And reaction from Democrats?

Well, I mean, you know, basically, I'm not planning to listen to anything in particular because I never know what Donald Trump's going to say. But this will be about, again, how he will negotiate deals that are in better favor of the United States, how he is already from he's already doing what he promised to do and that he's going to basically be it's a campaign speech campaign.

And you're going to see a lot of Republican unity. This is what this is. This is a show. And this is also the president reminding the Republican Party that he won, that he brought them in, that they owe him and they should stick with him. And this is a public display for that reason going into very difficult, I think, tax cuts and debt ceiling and budget negotiations in the next couple of weeks. I really appreciate the perspective ahead of that address. 9 p.m. Wall Street time on Capitol Hill. Our coverage begins at 8.

on a special edition of Bloomberg Balance of Power on Bloomberg Radio, Television, and the Bloomberg Podcast YouTube page. Wendy Schiller ahead of all that with us this morning, head of the Alfred Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy at Brown University. This episode is brought to you by Intuit Enterprise Suite. As businesses grow, so do the challenges. Data gets scattered, tools struggle to keep up, and manual tasks pile up. With the all-new Intuit Enterprise Suite, you can keep expanding with

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