VIENNA — Western
powers on Friday reported some progress in talks to save the landmark
Iran nuclear deal, but European diplomats warned that they were "rapidly
reaching the end of the road.”
اضافة اعلان
In a blow to European mediators,
Iran requested a new pause in the
talks in Vienna, which aim to bring the
United States back into the 2015 agreement and roll back nuclear activities. The
Islamic republic stepped up its nuclear projects after the US withdrawal.
The talks had just resumed in late November
after a five-month break following the election of a new hardline government in
Iran.
"There has been some technical progress
in the last 24 hours, but this only takes us back nearer to where the talks
stood in June," Britain, France and Germany, known as E3, said in a
statement.
"We are rapidly reaching the end of the
road for this negotiation."
Underlying Western concerns are fears that
Iran will soon have made enough progress that the 2015 accord — under which it
was promised economic relief in return for drastic curbs on its nuclear work —
will be obsolete.
Enrique Mora, the EU official chairing the
talks, called for a "sense of urgency" and for talks to resume before
the end of the year.
"We are not talking anymore about
months, we are talking about weeks," Mora said.
Limited progress
Former US president
Donald Trump pulled out
of the deal in 2018 and imposed sweeping sanctions including a unilateral US
ban on Iran's oil sales, vowing to bring the US adversary to its knees.
Presiden
t Joe Biden supports a return to the
agreement negotiated by predecessor Barack Obama, formally known as the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action, but has been frustrated by the pace of
resurrection efforts.
"It's not going well in the sense that
we do not yet have a pathway back into the
JCPOA," Biden's national
security advisor, Jake Sullivan, said of the talks.
"We are paying the wages of the
disastrous decision to leave the deal back in 2018," he said.
But Sullivan, speaking at the Council on
Foreign Relations in
Washington, said recent days "have brought some progress
at the bargaining table.”
Another US official said the latest round
was "better than it might have been" and "worse than it should
have been”.
The official called for a "very
significant acceleration" and said the US was ready to return before New
Year's.
"If it takes this much time to agree on
a common agenda, imagine how much time it will take to resolve the issues on
that agenda," he said.
Russia, which along with China is also in
the talks, said negotiators agreed to start from where they left off in June
before Iran requested a break for its elections.
The latest round was "successful in a
sense that it prepared sound basis for more intensive negotiations," envoy
Mikhail Ulyanov wrote on Twitter.
Tehran's chief negotiator Ali Bagheri said
there were "hard and intense negotiations" to agree on the
"bases" for further talks which will take place "in the near
future".
'Plan B'?
The
Biden administration has said it is
willing to lift sanctions but only if Iran returns to compliance.
Amid the deadlock, the United States has
increasingly spoken of a "Plan B" of pressure if talks fail.
A group of former officials including
Obama's defense secretary Leon Panetta and retired general David Petraeus in a
joint statement urged Biden to arrange high-profile military exercises or other
actions to strike fear into Iran.
"Without convincing Iran it will suffer
severe consequences if it stays on its current path, there is little reason to
hope for the success of diplomacy," they wrote, while also backing
humanitarian assistance.
Earlier this year, Tehran also began
restricting some inspection activities by the UN nuclear watchdog, the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Tehran and the Vienna-based IAEA announced
Wednesday that they had reached agreement on replacing the cameras at the TESA
nuclear complex in Karaj, west of Tehran, after they were damaged in a June
attack Iran blames on Israel.
IAEA director general
Rafael Grossi on
Friday voiced concern that a camera memory unit remained missing from the
complex.
"This is why we are asking them, 'Where
is it?' I'm hopeful that they are going to come up with an answer because it is
very strange that it disappears," Grossi said.
"We have ways to try to reconcile the
facts on the ground with what Iran is going to be telling us," he added.
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