Russia’s top diplomat at the Iran nuclear talks said there was a “very high probability” that Tehran and Washington will end their impasse over how to restore the 2015 atomic accord before the end of next week.
An agreement to revive the deal, which the U.S. abandoned in 2018, would “almost for sure” be settled “next week or before the end of the next week,” Mikhail Ulyanov said on the sidelines of the talks in Vienna on Sunday, warning that last-minute “surprise or negative developments” could still scuttle the negotiations.
The Russian diplomat, whose country has been slapped with a raft of international sanctions over its war with Ukraine, brushed off questions about whether the conflict could derail the negotiations, saying “theoretically even asteroids may have some affect on Vienna talks.”
Earlier on Sunday, state-run Nour News said Iran’s chief negotiator in the talks, Ali Bagheri Kani, was on his way back to the Austrian capital following a four-day visit to Tehran, where he consulted with the Islamic Republic’s leadership over the final stage of negotiations.
Ulyanov said he plans to meet Bagheri on Monday afternoon but declined to comment on what his Iranian counterpart will bring back from Tehran. Nour News said Bagheri intends “to resolve outstanding issues causing serious challenges to the deal.”
Over the past few weeks, diplomats have repeatedly warned that Iran and the U.S. have a limited time to bridge their differences, urging them to conclude matters by the end of February.
World powers have spent almost a year at the negotiating table trying to salvage a deal that would lift sanctions on Iran’s economy and allow it to substantially increase oil exports at a time of surging fuel prices. In exchange, Tehran is expected to reverse major advances in its nuclear program that breach the terms of the deal.
“I hoped very much that the negotiations would be over by the end of February. The remaining issues and questions are delicate and complicated and they need to be addressed in a full and expeditious manner,” Ulyanov said.
Among those outstanding sticking points are Iran’s demands for a guarantee from the U.S. that it won’t abandon the accord again in the future. Ulyanov said he believed this issue “has been resolved, but probably some additional fine tuning is possible.” He declined to give any further details.
Citing a senior Iranian lawmaker, Iran’s Entekhab newspaper reported that other outstanding issues included Tehran’s objections to U.S. sanctions legislation that was introduced after the original nuclear deal came into effect, and Iran’s demand that the U.S. no longer include the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — the most powerful branch of the Islamic Republic’s military — on its list of designated terrorist organizations.
