SULAIMANI (ESTA) — Efforts to revive Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal cannot succeed unless Washington lifts “major” sanctions, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said on Monday.
Reuters reported last week that a U.S.-Iranian deal is taking shape in Vienna after months of indirect talks to revive the nuclear pact abandoned in 2018 by then-U.S. President Donald Trump, who also reimposed extensive sanctions on Iran.
“The United States must prove its will to lift major sanctions,” Raisi said at a joint news conference with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani in Doha.
“To reach an agreement, guarantees are necessary for negotiations and nuclear issues.”
Iran had demanded legal assurances that the United States will not exit the deal again but Washington says it is impossible for U.S. President Joe Biden to provide them.
A senior Iranian official told Reuters that Tehran had shown flexibility in response by agreeing to “inherent guarantees”.
A draft text of the agreement also alluded to other issues, including unfreezing billions of dollars in Iranian funds in South Korean banks, and the release of Western prisoners held in Iran.
“Aggression is bound to fail. Resistance has brought results and none of the regional issues have a military solution,” Raisi said in Doha, according to Reuters.
He was more cautious than Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh, who said earlier on Monday that the Vienna negotiations had made “significant progress”.
Khatibzadeh added, however, that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”, telling a weekly press briefing: “The remaining issues are the hardest.”
Two sources close to the Vienna talks told Reuters that some minor technical issues were being discussed and that a deal was expected before end of the week.
Khatibzadeh said the talks were being handled by Iran’s top security body, the Supreme National Security Council, which reports directly to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The 2015 deal between Iran and world powers limited Tehran’s enrichment of uranium to make it harder for it to develop material for nuclear weapons, if it chose to, in return for a lifting of international sanctions against Tehran.
Since 2019, Tehran has gone well beyond the deal’s limits, rebuilding stockpiles of enriched uranium, refining it to higher fissile purity and installing advanced centrifuges to speed up output.
(Esta Media Network/Reuters)
