JAKARTA (Dispatches) --
Russia’s foreign minister says he’s not very optimistic about the revival of the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, citing the possibility of a shift in U.S. policy following next year’s presidential elections there.
“It is not very realistic to expect anything now because the US is holding an election in a year. A new administration will arrive and nobody knows whether it will be Democratic or Republican. Nobody can guarantee that the new administration will not repeat the stunt of pulling out of the agreement,” Sergei Lavrov said.
He made the remarks while speaking to reporters on the sidelines of a ministerial meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in the Indonesian capital Jakarta on Thursday.
Lavrov said the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was simply “broken” by the U.S., which acted against the UN charter

and a UN Security Council resolution enshrining the accord.
He said the Biden administration has been trying to get concessions from Tehran, instead of focusing on reviving the accord.
“The Joe Biden administration declared it is ready to resume the program and its involvement in it. But instead of taking specific decisions on resuming the resolution and the JCPOA in full, they started bargaining and pushing Iran’s representatives to agree on some things that are not covered by the JCPOA, and what they would like to get from Tehran on top of the plan,” Lavrov said.
The Russian diplomat said Iran and the other parties came close to an agreement in August 2022, when EU representatives presented a document to be approved by all parties, but European powers blocked that due to unknown reasons.
“Iran was ready. It was France, the UK and Germany that stalled the process. It is hard for me to see the reasons for this,” he said.
“Perhaps they wanted to push Iran to do something else. They saw that Iran was ready to agree and decided to push further and put the approval off.”