“Not this year, nor last year…” : Rouhani

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani says he has never asked for talks with his American counterpart, Donald Trump, stressing that such a meeting would not be “appropriate.”

Rouhani made the remarks in an interview with CNN on Tuesday during his stay in New York for the 73rd session of the United Nations General Assembly.

The Iranian president was reacting to Trump’s tweet on Tuesday, in which he tried to suggest that he had turned down requests to meet the Iranian president, but that he may agree to talks “someday in the future.”

However, Rouhani strongly dismissed Trump’s claim, saying that the Islamic Republic had not requested a meeting between the two leaders.

“Not this year, nor last year,” he told the CNN. “We have never made such a request for a meeting with the president of the United States.”

Rouhani also noted that while Iran had received eight requests from US officials for a meeting last year, he did not think talks between the two sides were “appropriate,” then or now.

Commenting on being called “a lovely man” by Trump, Rouhani said the US president is merely “playing with words and will not get us to any solutions.”

The remarks come amid a diplomatic standoff between Washington and Tehran after Trump pulled his country out of the 2015 Iran deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), despite objections from the other signatories to the accord.

Besides re-imposing the anti-Iran sanctions it had lifted under the accord, the Trump administration has also been seeking to put even more economic pressure on the Islamic Republic by threatening the European firms doing business with Tehran with punitive measures.