VIENNA/TEHRAN (Dispatches) — Further talks between Iran and other countries took place Sunday to try to negotiate and restore a landmark 2015 agreement that was later abandoned by the Trump administration.
It was the first official meeting since Iran’s judiciary chief won a landslide victory in the country’s presidential election last week.
Several diplomats involved in the talks said they made progress recently and that the results they negotiated need to be approved by the respective governments.
Senior diplomats from China, Germany, France, Russia and Britain met at a hotel in the Austrian capital for the final meeting of the sixth round of talks in Vienna.
Top Russian representative Mikhail Ulyanov wrote in a tweet late Saturday that the members of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, “will decide on the way ahead at the Vienna talks. An agreement on restoration of the nuclear deal is within reach but is not finalized yet.”
Iran’s deputy foreign minister for political affairs said Sunday that almost all JCPOA agreement documents had been readily negotiated and that the diplomats involved would shortly return to their home countries — not only for further consultations with their governments but also for final decision-making.
“We are now in a situation that we think almost all the agreement documents are ready,” Seyyed Abbas Araqchi said in Vienna ahead of the meeting, according to Iranian news agency Mehr.
“Of the main issues that remain disputed, some have been resolved and some remain, but it has taken on a very precise form and it is quite clear what the dimensions of these disputes are,” he added.
The U.S. does not have a representative at the table in Vienna because former U.S. President Donald Trump unilaterally pulled the country out of the deal in 2018. Trump also restored and augmented sanctions to try to force Iran into renegotiating the pact with more concessions.
However, the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has signaled willingness to rejoin the deal under terms that would broadly see the United States scale back sanctions even though it has been dragging its feet on that.
Sunday’s meeting came after the election of Raisi in Iran, which puts Principlists firmly in control of the government. Tensions remain high with both the U.S. and the occupying regime of Israel, which is believed to have carried out a series of attacks targeting Iranian nuclear sites as well as assassinating the scientist who created its nuclear energy program decades earlier.
In Jerusalem Al-Quds, new extremist PM Naftali Bennett claimed Sunday that Raisi’s election as Iranian president was “the last chance for the world powers to wake up before returning to the nuclear agreement and to understand who they’re doing business with.
The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, touched on reaching a deal in Vienna.
“We are very close. We have been working for two months,” Borrell told reporters during a visit in the Lebanese capital Beirut.
A detailed report by the Iranian parliament’s Research Center (IPRC) said the U.S. is placing obstacles in the way of removing sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
Washington, the report said, has devised a net of “legal” obstacles in order to perpetuate Iran’s problems by making nuclear and non-nuclear sanctions inseparable.
The United States will use various tools to stop Iran’s economy profiting from the removal of sanctions even if it intends to remove them on paper, it added.
The U.S. has so far failed to make any effort with regard to improving the risk index of interaction and cooperation with Iran, and maintained the current level of cooperation risk for the countries that wish to engage in trade with Tehran, the report said.
The United States, it said, has disrupted Iran’s economic cooperation, overstated drawbacks, and heightened the political and economic risks of cooperation with Iran through formal rhetoric, media attacks, and informal pressures.
The report conducted by the IPRC has significant impact on the decisions of the Iranian lawmakers.
Back in April, the Research Center stated in an in-depth report that the verification of a possible U.S. removal of sanctions on Tehran would require at least three months, emphasizing that the process would not be possible within hours or days.
Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has said verification means Iran should be able to sell its oil under normal conditions and receive its money.
The United States, under former president Donald Trump, left the multilateral 2015 nuclear deal in May 2018 and restored the economic sanctions that the accord had lifted in addition to imposing new non-nuclear ones.
Tehran responded to the breach by taking a raft of remedial nuclear measures under the JCPOA’s Paragraph 36.
The Islamic Republic has insisted that it would go back on its steps once the US removed all the sanctions in one step and Iran verified them.