Moscow - Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki met with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Moscow on Friday for talks, news agencies reported.

"We regularly talk and review our relations at the highest level," Lavrov said at a joint press conference in Moscow. "I mean our trade relations, questions concerning the completion of the nuclear power plant at Bushehr, and other issues."

Russia this year sent the first shipments of nuclear fuel to the plant it is building for Iran in Bushehr.

The operation is viewed with suspicion in the United States, which believes the civilian nuclear programme is a cover for ambitions of the Islamic state build atomic weapons.

Russia, as a fellow member of the UN Security Council, has a prominent role in negotiations over Tehran's nuclear programme.

But Moscow opposes a US push for new UN sanctions, saying there is no proof that Tehran is developing weapons.

Lavrov has also refuted US assertions that Iran could pose a missile threat, a claim that is at the heart of US plans to site a missile defense system near Russia's borders in eastern Europe.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad met with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Summit (SCO), an counter-NATO Soviet-era military alliance of Asian states. (dpa)