MOSCOW, January 17 (RIA Novosti)-Russia's foreign minister said Thursday that questions about Iran's nuclear program should also be addressed to Western countries.

Sergei Lavrov said: "Before Russia started cooperating with Iran in this sphere, many Western companies cooperated with it."

The minister said that if the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, wanted to find answers to issues that arose 20 years ago, it would have to look toward the West.

"If the IAEA has certain questions about secrets in Iran's [nuclear] program, they should be addressed to Western countries as well, because they were also involved in this sphere," Lavrov said.

Politicians should deal with non-proliferation concerns, leaving the task of finding the truth about Iran's nuclear research to IAEA experts, the Russian minister said after meeting with his French counterpart Philippe Douste-Blazy in Moscow.

The French minister had urged the international community earlier to unite efforts to resolve the issue of Iran's nuclear program and said he hoped that Russia would support the position of a trio of nations representing the European Union at an emergency meeting of the IAEA Board of Governors in Vienna.