Sides note progress on Iran nuclear talks

Political choices still on horizon, diplomats warn

VIENNA — Top diplomats said Sunday that further progress had been made at talks between Iran and global powers to try to restore a landmark 2015 agreement to contain Iranian nuclear development that was abandoned by the Trump administration. They said it was now up to the governments involved in the negotiations to make political decisions.

It was the first official meeting since Iran’s hard-line cleric Ebrahim Raisi won a landslide victory in the country’s presidential election last week.

Some diplomats expressed concern that Iran’s election of Raisi could complicate a possible return to the nuclear agreement.

Enrique Mora, the European Union official who chaired the final meeting of the sixth round of talks between Russia, China, Germany, France, Britain and Iran, told reporters that “we are closer to a deal, but we are not still there.”

It’s the third time since talks began in April that negotiators have missed self-imposed deadlines to rejuvenate the agreement.

“How many mistakes can I make, I don’t know,” Mora said, after twice predicting the next round of talks would be the last, most recently on June 2.

“We have made progress on a number of technical issues,” Mora added. “We have now more clarity on technical documents — all of them quite complex — and that clarity allows us to have also a great idea of what the political problems are.”

He did not elaborate. Top Russian representative Mikhail Ulyanov said the members of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,

or JCPOA, “took stock of the significant progress made at the Vienna talks, including at the sixth round, and decided to make a break to allow participants to consult with their capitals in preparation for what is supposed to be the final round of negotiations.”

“There are a few controversial points which require political decisions. Apparently diplomatic efforts to find common language have been almost fully exhausted. So the time has come for political decisions,” Ulyanov added.

The nations involved in the negotiations have been trying to resolve the major outstanding issues on how to return the U.S. into the landmark agreement, which thenU.S. President Donald Trump pulled out of in 2018. Trump also restored and augmented sanctions to try to force Iran into renegotiating the pact with more concessions.

Sanctions on Iran’s energy sector and a U.S. ban on purchases of its oil have cost its economy more than $100 billion in the three years since Washington withdrew from the agreement, the Islamic Republic’s oil minister, Bijan Namdar Zanganeh, said Sunday.

Ulyanov said after heading back to report on the talks’ results to their respective governments, he expected the diplomats to return for the final round of talks in Vienna in about 10 days and said they could finalize negotiations by mid-July.

“I believe we have all chances to arrive at the final point of our negotiations, maybe even by mid-July, unless something extraordinary and negative happens,” he said.

In a written statement after the talks Sunday, the E3 European senior diplomats urged speedy decision-making in the capitals involved in the talks.

“Delegations will now travel to capitals in order to consult with their leadership,” the diplomats wrote without giving their names, as is customary. “We urge all sides to return to Vienna and be ready to conclude a deal. The time for decision is fast approaching.”

Iran’s deputy foreign minister for political affairs said Sunday before the meeting that “we think almost all the agreement documents are ready,” according to semiofficial Iranian news agency Mehr.

“Of the main issues that remain disputed, some have been resolved and some remain, but it has taken on a very precise form and it is quite clear what the dimensions of these disputes are,” Seyyed Abbas Araghchi said.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said Sunday that he hoped the election of the new Iranian president would not be an obstacle to reaching a deal in Vienna.

“We are very close. We have been working for two months,” Borrell told reporters during a visit in the Lebanese capital of Beirut. “So I hope that the results of the elections is not going to be the last obstacle that will ruin the negotiation process.”

U.S. WEIGHS IN

The U.S. did not have a representative at the table in Vienna. However, President Joe Biden’s administration has signaled willingness to rejoin the Iran deal under terms that would broadly see the U.S. scale back sanctions and Iran return to its 2015 nuclear commitments. A U.S. delegation in Vienna is taking part in indirect talks with Iran, with diplomats from the other world powers acting as go-betweens.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan said Sunday that preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon remains a “paramount priority” for the United States, emphasizing that diplomacy “is the best way to achieve that.”

Sullivan weighed in on the issue during appearances on the Sunday morning news shows one day after Raisi’s election.

Sullivan added that the U.S. believes the decision on whether to revive the 2015 nuclear deal lies not with Raisi but with Iran’s 82-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“He was the same person before this election as he is after the election, so ultimately, it lies with him,” Sullivan said.

Tensions remain high with Iran and both the U.S. and Israel, which is believed to have carried out a series of attacks targeting Iranian nuclear sites as well as assassinating the scientist who created its military atomic program decades earlier.

Raisi is the first Iranian president sanctioned by the U.S. government even before entering office, over his involvement in 1988 mass executions, as well as his time as the head of Iran’s internationally criticized judiciary — one of the world’s top executioners. Iran insists these sanctions must be removed as part of a renewed agreement.

ISRAELI CABINET

In Jerusalem, new Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett opened his first Cabinet meeting Sunday with a warning that Raisi’s election was “the last chance for the world powers to wake up before returning to the nuclear agreement and to understand who they’re doing business with.”

“These guys are murderers, mass murderers: a regime of brutal hangmen must never be allowed to have weapons of mass destruction that will enable it to not kill thousands, but millions,” he said.

Bennett said Iran’s Khamenei had chosen the “hangman of Tehran” to be the country’s next president, a man “infamous among Iranians and across the world for leading the death committees that executed thousands of innocent Iranian citizens throughout the years.”

Israel, which is believed to have its own undeclared nuclear arsenal, has long stated that it opposes Iran’s nuclear program and the nuclear deal itself, and said it would prevent Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Iran insists its nuclear program is intended for peaceful purposes.

Earlier this month, Israel’s outgoing Mossad intelligence chief signaled that Israel was behind a string of recent attacks targeting the country’s nuclear program.

Bennett heads a broad coalition of parties ranging from hard-line Jewish nationalists to liberal factions and a small Islamist party. His government was sworn in last week, sending Benjamin Netanyahu to the opposition after a record 12 years as prime minister.

Later on Sunday, at a memorial ceremony for Israelis killed in the 2014 Gaza war, Bennett warned Hamas that

Israel “will not tolerate violence, we will not tolerate a drizzle.”

He appeared to be referring to incendiary balloons launched from Gaza in recent days that have set fields ablaze

inside Israel. Last week, Israel launched airstrikes on two occasions in response to the balloons sent by activists mobilized by Hamas. Information from this article was contributed by Amir Vahdat, Ilan Ben Zion, Sarah El Deeb, Alexandra Jaffe, Isabel DeBre, Joseph Krauss, Phillip Jenne and Kirsten Grieshaber of The Associated Press; by Felicia Sonmez, Marianna Sotomayor, Jeanne Whalen and Kareem Fahim of The Washington Post; and by Jonathan Tirone and Golnar Motevalli of Bloomberg News.