Wednesday October 27, 2021
Continued in November
Iran is likely to return to nuclear talks
When the United States left the nuclear deal under ex-President Trump in 2018, Iran started enriching uranium again. The first negotiations will take place in April and they will have to be interrupted. Since then, the EU has tried to keep it going. Now Tehran is reporting a success.
Iran will resume nuclear negotiations in Vienna next month. Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri announced this on Twitter. “The negotiations today in Brussels with (the EU’s Deputy Foreign Representative) Enrique Mora were very constructive and we agreed to resume the nuclear negotiations in November,” said the deputy minister and future head of the Iranian nuclear delegation in Vienna. The exact date will be announced next week, according to Bagheri.
Before the official resumption of the nuclear negotiations, Iran wanted to hold consultations on “remaining differences” in order to enable “result-oriented negotiations”. That is why Bagheri met Mora in Brussels now. Both diplomats last met for talks in Tehran in mid-October.
EU is keeping a low profile
The EU initially did not want to confirm the announcement: “At the moment there is nothing to announce from our side,” said EU circles after the meeting. Brussels has been trying to revive the talks in Vienna for months. The negotiations resumed in April were interrupted after the presidential election in June and the change of government in Tehran. China, Germany, France, Great Britain and Russia are trying to get the US back to the agreement. Iran should also enter into technical obligations.
The Vienna deal was supposed to prevent the construction of Iranian nuclear weapons. In return, the sanctions against Iran should be lifted. The then US President Donald Trump terminated the agreement in 2018 and renewed economic sanctions against Iran. The sanctions are partly responsible for the worst economic crisis in the country to date. In response to the US sanctions, Tehran began exceeding the technical restrictions placed on it in the agreement in 2019. Among other things, the country increased uranium enrichment from the permitted 3.67 to 60 percent.