TEHRAN -- President Ebrahim Raisi said Friday efforts to neutralize U.S. sanctions on Iran are not tied to Vienna negotiations with the remaining signatories of the 2015 nuclear agreement.
“Although the pursuit of removing sanctions is a serious agenda of the government, the effort in the thirteenth government to neutralize the sanctions has not been dependent on negotiations, so that today and under the sanctions situation, our oil sales have increased so much that we no longer worry and the proceeds are also returning to the country,” Raisi wrote in a tweet.
Diplomats from Iran and the other remaining parties to the 2015 Iran agreement, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), are engaged in the eighth round of diplomatic negotiations in Austria’s capital to bring the U.S. back into the deal.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday that there are only “a few weeks left” to save the JCPOA, warning that Washington was ready to look at “other options” if the Vienna talks failed.
“We have, I think, a few weeks left to see if we can get back to mutual compliance,” Blinken said in an interview with U.S. public radio station NPR.
“We’re very, very short on time,” because “Iran is getting closer and closer to the point where they could produce on very, very short order enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon,” he claimed.
Blinken said Tehran has made nuclear advances that “will become increasingly hard to reverse because they’re learning things, they’re doing new things as a result of having broken out of their constraints under the agreement.”
The U.S. and the Europeans use the hypothesis of an atomic weapon for propaganda against Iran’s nuclear energy program which has been subject to the most intrusive UN inspections ever.
The UN nuclear agency has repeatedly verified the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear activities. Moreover, the Islamic Republic has a religious fatwa in place, issued by Leader of the Islamic Revolution Seyyed Ali Khamenei, forbidding nuclear weapons.
The U.S. abandoned the JCPOA in 2018 under former president Donald Trump and imposed more than a thousand sanctions on the Islamic Republic. Undoing Trump’s wrongs would mean the U.S. needs to verifiably remove all of those sanctions.
In a letter addressed to U.S. Secretary

of Blinken on Tuesday, 110 House Republicans urged the White House to enforce the existing sanctions against Tehran.
“The United States and our partners must increase pressure on Iran to stop its dangerous nuclear advancements,” the letter read.
They particularly called on the Biden administration to enforce the existing sanctions on Iran’s oil trade with China.
On Thursday, an Iranian website affiliated to the country’s Supreme National Security Council said the United States has resorted to a new political and psychological ploy to further pressure Iran.
Nour News said the Western countries, especially the U.S., are trying to put psychological pressure on the Iranian negotiating team in order to impose their will on Tehran while shirking their own responsibilities and obligations.
The Islamic Republic will not back down on its legal and logical positions under any circumstances, even though the U.S.-led side of the negotiating table is trying to bypass Iran’s initiatives on the need for the U.S. to provide guarantees as well as the necessity of a process to verify the removal of U.S. sanctions, it said.
Nour News branded the new letter by U.S. lawmakers as an “overused approach” that was also employed during the original talks that led to the formation of the JCPOA in 2015.
It said even if the pressure on the U.S. president is real, “this is merely a domestic U.S. issue and shall have no bearing on other parties to the negotiations”.
“If the U.S. president does not have enough authority to manage the political elements of his country to reach an agreement, he should not have entered into this path at all,” the article said.
The move shows that the U.S. administration does not have the necessary authority and ability to fulfill its obligations, and this issue calls into question the principle of negotiations to reach an agreement, it added.
Diplomats from Iran and the other remaining parties to the JCPOA are engaged in the eighth round of diplomatic negotiations in Austria’s capital to bring the U.S. back into compliance.