TEHRAN —
Iran will only return to Vienna to finalize an agreement to revive its landmark
2015 nuclear deal with world powers, foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh
said Monday.
اضافة اعلان
“We will not be
going to Vienna for new negotiations but to finalize the nuclear agreement,”
Khatibzadeh told reporters in Tehran.
However, Iran
said there were still issues that it was waiting on Washington to
settle.
“At the moment,
we do not yet have a definitive answer from Washington,” Khatibzadeh said.
“If Washington
answers the outstanding questions, we can go to Vienna as soon as possible.”
Tehran has been
engaged in negotiations to revive the deal, known formally as the
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), with Britain, China, France, Germany, and
Russia directly, and the US indirectly.
Iranian and US
delegations in Vienna do not communicate directly, but messages are passed
through other participants and the EU, which is coordinating the talks.
Nearly a year of
negotiations have brought the parties close to renewing the 2015 accord.
But the talks
were halted last month, after
Russia demanded guarantees that Western sanctions
imposed following its invasion of Ukraine would not damage its trade with Iran.
Russian Foreign
Minister
Sergei Lavrov later said Moscow had received the necessary guarantees
from Washington on trade with Iran.
Among the key
sticking points is Tehran’s demand to remove from the US terror list the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the ideological arm of Iran’s military.
Washington
recently confirmed that sanctions on the
IRGC would stay.
“Today, in the
final phase, the United States seeks to deprive Iran of the economic benefits
of the agreement,” Khatibzadeh said.
The JCPOA gave
Iran sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program to guarantee
that Tehran could not develop or acquire a nuclear weapon — something it has
always denied wanting to do.
But the US
unilateral withdrawal from the accord in 2018 under then-president Donald Trump
and the re-imposition of biting economic sanctions prompted Iran to begin
rolling back its own commitments.
The Vienna talks aim to
return the
US to the nuclear deal, including through the lifting of sanctions
on Iran, and to ensure Tehran’s full compliance with its commitments.
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