Iran’s president tells Pakistani mediator any talks require US to lift all pressure, threats and sanctions first

Iran's insistence that Washington move first reframes the diplomatic question from whether talks happen to who absorbs the political cost of initiating them. The demand, relayed through Pakistani mediators rather than a direct channel, suggests Tehran is testing whether third-party brokers can extract concessions it cannot secure bilaterally. For markets, this matters less as a headline than as a signal on how far any de-escalation path is from being actionable. Whether the precondition softens into a negotiable opening position, or hardens into a standing barrier, is the open question.