VIENNA (Dispatches) – The
remaining parties to a 2015 nuclear deal and Iran were locked in talks about removing sanctions on Tehran Friday, with Iranian officials saying they were keeping to the country’s stance from last week.
The talks resumed on Thursday with the U.S., as well as the occupying regime of Israel which are not a party to the deal, ramping up hostile rhetoric and possible economic or military threats if diplomacy fails.
Iran’s top negotiator, Ali Bagheri Kani, said Tehran was sticking to the stance it laid out last week, when the Europeans requested a break to take Iran’s two draft proposals to their capitals.
When asked whether the new draft proposals were being discussed with major powers, Bagheri Kani told Reuters: “Yes, the drafts we proposed last week are being discussed now in meetings with other parties.”
Bagheri said last week that “all the issues that had been drafted during the previous negotiations until June can be negotiated”.
After the Thursday meeting, Russia’s Mikhail Ulyanov, who leads his country’s negotiating team, said that Iran’s new proposals “must be properly discussed and thoroughly considered.”
“This is an edict in multilateral diplomacy,” he said via Twitter.
Speaking to reporters after the talks, Bagheri Kani, “What I felt today was different from what I had felt last Friday.”
“I felt the other parties have more serious will to enter effective and result-oriented talks.”
Ulyanov also said that Iran showed “a great deal of pragmatism today at the Joint Commission meeting.”
“The same is required from all other participants in the #ViennaTalks. Through joint pragmatic efforts we have a real chance to succeed,” Ulyanov tweeted.
The talks between Iran diplomats from the remaining parties - France, Britain, Germany, Russia and China - aim to get the U.S. to resume full compliance with the accord.
Working groups to discuss sanctions Washington has to remove in order to convince Iran to rescind its remedial measures were to convene on Friday.
“Iran’s seriousness is obvious. See who has cancelled other meetings and is in Vienna and who is not,” Bagheri Kani said.
Last week’s discussions followed a five-month hiatus that saw President Ebrahim Raisi come to office and Iran send a new team of negotiators to Vienna.
Iran wants all sanctions imposed by Washington after it left the deal to be removed in a verifiable process. Iran began scaling down its compliance with the nuclear deal about a year after the U.S. withdrawal, during which Tehran patiently waited for the remaining parties to compensate the Islamic Republic and protect it from the sanctions as per the agreement, but to no avail.
Foreign Minister Hussein Amir-Abdollahian underlined Iran’s resolve to reach a “good agreement”, saying the Western sides have talked the talk in recent years but it is high time they walk the walk as well to secure a serious, good deal.
“We are all in Vienna to negotiate to reach a good agreement,” he wrote in a post on his Instagram page on Thursday night, hours after the new round of talks began.
“The Western parties need to know that in the last eight years, enough words and empty promises have been uttered, but today, it is time to act,” Amir-Abdollahian noted.
Eleven months after Joe Biden was sworn in as president, the U.S. is still refusing to remove the sanctions, despite his pledge to undo the wrongs of his predecessor which imposed the most draconian sanctions ever on Iran.
The Biden administration, instead, has doubled down on the coercive measures and imposed new sanctions on Iran.
A State Department spokesperson said on Thursday the United States will send a senior government delegation to the United Arab Emirates next week to meet with banks over concerns about Iran sanctions compliance.
The move suggests Washington is looking to crank up economic pressure on Tehran. It also comes as the UAE, a U.S. ally, works to improve ties with neighbor Iran.
The U.S. delegation, which will include the head of the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, Andrea Gacki, will warn banks in the UAE that have business with Iran, Reuters said.
A senior American official was also quoted as saying that the Pentagon chief and the occupying regime of Israel’s war minister were about to discuss possible military exercises in the region.
“In our opinion, they should understand that it is a certain destabilizing factor,” Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told reporters on Thursday when asked to comment on the report.
“Any training activity in such a volatile region carries the risk that it will entail complications. It’s not what the situation requires at the moment,” he said.