TEHRAN -- President Ebrahim Raisi has held a phone conversation with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, outlining the foundations which an agreement between Iran and the P4+1 group of states has to be based on.
Any agreement has to be founded on the removal of U.S. sanctions, the ability to verify them and credible guarantees that the Americans would not abandon their obligations anymore.
Any effort on the part of the other side should incorporate these three categories, the Iranian president said.
Since last year, Iran and the P4+1 have held eight rounds of talks in Vienna to discuss how to remove the sanctions and bring the United States back to compliance with the nuclear agreement which it abandoned in 2018.
Raisi said the U.S. itself has admitted that the former American administration’s policy of “maximum pressure,” under which Washington left the 2015 deal and re-imposed the sanctions, had ended in failure.
The French president, for his part, acknowledged that the Islamic Republic was “rightful” not to trust the U.S., because it was Washington that led the deal into its current “crisis” in the first place.
France, Germany and Britain, known as E3, are trying along with Iran, Russia and China to save the Vienna agreement which is on life support since the U.S. withdrawal.
Macron said a deal removing sanctions on Iran is still possible but talks need to accelerate.
“The President of the Republic reiterated his conviction that a diplomatic solution is possible and imperative, and stressed that any agreement will require clear and sufficient commitments from all the parties,” the Elysee palace said in a statement.
“Several months after the resumption of negotiations in Vienna, he insisted on the need to accelerate in order to quickly achieve tangible progress in this framework,” it added.