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Western powers on Tuesday warned Russia against derailing a nearly completed deal to bring the United States and Iran back into line with the 2015 nuclear deal as Iran’s chief negotiator was scheduled to return from consultations in Tehran.
Eleven-month talks to reinstate an agreement to lift sanctions on Iran in exchange for limiting its nuclear program have come to an end.
REPUBLICANS ARE CONCERNED BY ONGOING NEGOTIATIONS TO RESTORE NUCLEAR DEAL WITH IRAN: “RUSSIA SHOULD NOT SIT AT ANY TABLE”
But they were complicated by the fact that at the last moment Russia demanded from the United States guarantees that Western sanctions against Moscow in connection with its invasion of Ukraine would not affect its business relations with Iran.
Newly elected Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi during a press conference in Tehran, Iran on Monday. (AP photo)
US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland said that Russia is seeking to reap additional benefits from its participation in efforts to restore the nuclear agreement, but it will not succeed.
“Russia is trying to raise the stakes and expand its demands on the (nuclear deal) and we are not playing Let’s Make a Deal,” Nuland, a third U.S. diplomat, told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
Iran’s chief negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani is due to return to Vienna on Wednesday after unexpectedly returning to Tehran on Monday for consultations, an Iranian and European official said.
Negotiations coordinator Enrique Mora of the European Union said on Monday it was time for political decisions to be made to end the talks.
“The window of opportunity is closing. We call on all parties to take the decisions necessary to close this deal now, and not to add extraneous conditions to Russia, ”the UK, France and Germany said in a joint statement to the UN. Board of Governors of 35 nuclear watchdog countries.
Iran has been keen to lift all sanctions and wants assurances from the United States that it will not back out of the deal once again after then US President Donald Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018 and re-imposed sanctions.
Diplomats have said so far that some differences still need to be overcome in the talks, including the extent to which sanctions on Iran, especially its elite revolutionary guard, will be lifted, and what guarantees Washington will give if it again relinquish its obligations. deal.
A satellite image provided by Planet Labs Inc. shows the Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz. ((Planet Labs via AP))
Two Western officials said that now the final text is on the negotiating table, and these issues have been resolved.
While they couldn’t rule out further last-minute surprises, they said the final big open question was whether Russia’s demands were manageably narrow and limited to the nuclear cooperation outlined in the agreement, as Moscow’s negotiating spokesman told the other parties, or much broader. , as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov described them.
RUSSIA LINKS POSSIBLE REVIVAL OF IRANIAN NUCLEAR DEAL TO UKRAINIAN SANCTIONS
“We are very close to an agreement. It is imperative that we conclude it while we still can,” French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Anne-Clair Legendre told reporters at a daily briefing.
“We are concerned about the risks that further delays could impact the ability to complete,” she said.
GENERAL INTEREST
Moscow gave a potential boost to the work on Saturday, when months of indirect talks between Tehran and Washington in Vienna seemed to lead to an agreement, and Lavrov said Western sanctions on Ukraine were a stumbling block to the nuclear deal.
EU representative Mora and Russia’s chief negotiator Mikhail Ulyanov held talks in Vienna on Tuesday evening, exchanging views on “current developments and the future,” a spokesman for Moscow said on Twitter.
Western officials say there is a common interest in averting a nuclear nonproliferation crisis, and they are trying to find out if what Russia is demanding only applies to its commitment to the Iran deal. They say it can be dealt with, but anything beyond that will be problematic.
The new deal will see Russia take the excess highly enriched uranium that will be taken out of Iran to bring Tehran back into line with the original deal’s limits on the purity and amount of enriched uranium it is stockpiling.
Members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards march during a parade to commemorate the anniversary of the Iran-Iraq war
Rosatom, a state-owned company created by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2007, plays a key role in this and has so far escaped Western sanctions.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, during a visit to Estonia on Tuesday, downplayed the issue and said Russia and the United States still share the desire to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
European negotiators from France, Britain and Germany had already temporarily left the talks, as they believed they had gone as far as they could, and now the two main negotiators had to agree on outstanding issues.
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Additional reporting by Dubai Newsroom, Simon Lewis and Andrius Sitas in Tallinn; Writing by John Irish and Dominic Evans; Editing by Jonathan Oatis, Nick McPhee and Richard Pullin