VIENNA — Iran’s chief negotiator for the Vienna nuclear talks returned home unexpectedly on Monday evening, prompting European officials to say talks have stalled.
Iranian officials said that Ali Bagheri-Kani, who heads the Iranian negotiating team, will soon return to Vienna. Two Western diplomats said it was not clear why Mr. Bagheri-Kani left and when he would return.
His resignation comes after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Iranian counterpart discussed Moscow’s demand over the weekend that Washington provide it with written assurances that Western sanctions on Ukraine will not hurt future Russian-Iranian trade.
The sudden departure of Mr. Bagheri-Kani raises the possibility that the 11-month-long Vienna talks to restart the 2015 nuclear deal could collapse. The 2015 agreement lifted most international sanctions on Tehran in exchange for tight but temporary restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program.
“In the next few days, it is time to take political decisions to end the Vienna talks,” Enrique Mora, the European Union representative who chairs the talks, said on Twitter.
These are concrete steps that Iran and the US will take to return to compliance with the 2015 agreement. The United States pulled out of the nuclear deal under President Donald Trump, who said the deal would not prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Since then, Iran has expanded its nuclear development and now has enough highly enriched uranium to power one nuclear weapon.
US and Iranian officials have said in recent days that they still have not reached a final agreement on resuming the agreement, with a couple of significant disagreements remaining, including over what sanctions Washington will lift to renew the agreement.
On Friday, the main representatives of Britain, France and Germany returned home.
Over the weekend, Russia further clouded the prospects for an agreement when Mr. Lavrov demanded assurances that US and European sanctions imposed on Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine would not affect Russia’s future trade with Iran. Western officials have said they will never agree to wide-ranging sanctions exemptions on Russia over the nuclear deal. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said on Sunday that Mr. Lavrov’s demands were misplaced.
“Unless definitive decisions are made now in Washington and Tehran, this agreement will be in serious jeopardy,” a senior Western diplomat said on Monday. “By postponing these decisions, Moscow has opened a window to wreak havoc.”
Mr. Lavrov’s demands appeared to irritate Iranian officials, who said over the weekend they were seeking clarification in Moscow. Iranian media on Monday quoted Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian as saying that Iran “will not allow any external factor to influence national interests to lift sanctions in the Vienna talks.”
Although Iran says it is not trying to build nuclear weapons, a look at its key facilities suggests that it could develop the technology to produce them. The WSJ destroys Tehran’s capabilities when it reaches new milestones in uranium enrichment and limits access to inspectors. Photo illustration: George Downes
On Monday afternoon, after a telephone conversation between Mr. Lavrov and Mr. Amir-Abdollahian, Russia released a report doubling down on its call for a renewal of the nuclear deal to “ensure equal rights for all involved” to develop “cooperation in all areas with Iran. Over the weekend, Mr. Lavrov asked Washington for written assurances that this demand would be met.
The Iranian text of the phone conversation says that Mr. Amir-Abdollahian stressed that the sanctions should not affect Iran’s cooperation with any country, including Russia.
US and European officials hoped to complete negotiations last week. U.S. officials have been saying for some time that the negotiations are only days away because Iran’s nuclear work has advanced so far that it may soon be impossible to recreate the benefits of the nuclear deal for Washington: keeping Iran months away from enough nuclear fuel to bombs.
Since negotiations on the Iranian nuclear deal began in earnest in 2013, they have weathered a number of external crises, including Russia’s previous invasion of Ukraine in 2014; the Syrian conflict, which has united Iran and Russia against Western-backed rebels; and growing tensions between the US and China.
However, Western officials said last week that the conflict in Ukraine was increasingly seeping into negotiations and that they feared the diplomatic window for a deal could quickly close. According to them, the main representative of Russia in the negotiations, Mikhail Ulyanov, much more often had to sort things out with Moscow.
Ulyanov, two diplomats said, late last week presented Mr. Mohr’s EU group with a document setting out demands for written assurances that Russia’s objectives in the nuclear deal, including a uranium swap with Iran and work on an Iranian nuclear program should not be undermined by Western sanctions.
U.S. and European officials said this could be resolved, but Mr. Lavrov’s demands for exemptions from sanctions that “damage our right to free and full trade, economic and investment cooperation, and military-technical cooperation” with Iran could make a hole in Ukraine. imposed sanctions against Russia.
Write to Laurens Norman: [email protected]
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