Washington , (AFP) - The United States said Wednesday that Iran risks becoming a kind of "subordination" to Russia, in a warning that comes a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Tehran , where he participated in a Russian-Iranian-Turkish summit.

During the tripartite summit, whose main topic was the situation in Syria, Putin also discussed with his Iranian counterparts Ibrahim Raisi and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan the file of the war in Ukraine.

In Tehran, Putin also met the Islamic Republic's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who called for strengthening "long-term cooperation" between Iran and Russia, although Tehran abstained during a UN vote on a resolution condemning Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine.

And on Wednesday, US State Department spokesman Ned Price said, "Iran has now united its fate with a small number of countries that initially dressed as neutral and ultimately supported President Putin in his war against Ukraine and the Ukrainian people."

He added that such behavior could make the Islamic Republic "relatively dependent on a country like Russia."

The United States recently published intelligence that Russian officials visited Iran at least twice this summer to inspect combat drones that Tehran intends to provide the Russian army with to enable it to counter Western equipment flowing into Ukraine.

According to Price, the safest solution for Iran lies in its return to the Vienna Agreement.

In 2015, Iran and the six major countries concluded an agreement in Vienna regarding its nuclear program, which allowed the lifting of sanctions that were imposed on it, in exchange for restricting its nuclear activities and ensuring the peacefulness of its program.

In April 2021, indirect negotiations began in Vienna, under the auspices of the European Union, between Tehran and Washington, aiming for the United States to return to the agreement, and for Iran to fully fulfill its obligations stipulated in it.

The US spokesman also called on Tehran to forge "new economic relations with other countries in the world."

Indirect negotiations between the United States and the Islamic Republic on the nuclear file are stuck, especially because of Tehran's insistence that Washington lift the sanctions imposed on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which President Joe Biden's administration has rejected so far.

And on Wednesday, CIA Director William Burns, the former diplomat who contributed to the conclusion of the Vienna agreement, said that the main reason for the current rapprochement between Russia and Iran is that both are subject to sanctions and "seek to break their political isolation."

But Burns stressed during the "Aspen Security Forum" in the Rocky Mountains, Colorado (west), that "if (Russia and Iran) need each other, they do not really trust each other, as they compete in the field of energy and they are rivals throughout history."