Iran's Foreign Minister Araghchi held talks with Pakistan's Army Chief on regional developments, with the two sides discussing ongoing diplomatic initiatives, potential political solutions and ways to deepen consultation and cooperation

• Pakistan continues to be the main mediator between US and Iran, according to Iran's Foreign Ministry.

Back-channel mediation of this kind is a familiar feature of US-Iran standoffs, where the absence of direct diplomatic relations has historically routed contact through intermediaries, whether Gulf states, European capitals, or regional neighbours. Pakistan in the intermediary seat is notable less for precedent than for what it implies about the state of other channels: when the traditional conduits are sidelined or degraded, Washington and Tehran have tended to work through whoever retains trust on both sides, and Islamabad's army chief rather than its civilian foreign office taking the meeting signals the security establishment is carrying the file. Talks described as covering political solutions and diplomatic initiatives are the standard early-stage vocabulary of a de-escalation track, and on previous occasions such language has preceded either a quiet understandings phase or a public breakdown, with little middle ground. The tells are whether the mediator shuttles again within days, whether either capital issues a competing account of the readout, and whether any movement appears on the underlying dispute points rather than the atmospherics. For crude, the established pattern is that credible mediation headlines trim the geopolitical risk premium embedded in prompt spreads and freight, while a stalled channel restores it; nothing here yet indicates which fork applies.