A top Iranian official yesterday said that his country is seeking “creative ways” to restore its nuclear deal with world powers after Russia’s foreign minister linked sanctions on Moscow over its war on Ukraine to the ongoing negotiations.
In a post on Twitter, Iranian Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Shamkhani offered the first high-level acknowledgment of the demands of Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov.
“Vienna participants act & react based on interests and it’s understandable,” Shamkhani wrote. “Our interactions ... are also solely driven by our people’s interests. Thus, we’re assessing new elements that bear on the negotiations and will accordingly seek creative ways to expedite a solution.”
Photo: AP
In the past few days, negotiators on all sides in Vienna had signaled that a potential deal was close as the head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog agreed to a timetable with Iran for it to disclose answers to long-standing questions that it had about Tehran’s nuclear program.
However, Lavrov on Saturday said that he wanted “guarantees at least at the level of the secretary of state” that the US sanctions would not affect Moscow’s relationship with Tehran.
That threw into question the months of negotiations held so far on restoring the 2015 deal, which saw Iran agree to drastically limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.
On Sunday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Lavrov’s demand “irrelevant,” as the nuclear deal and sanctions on Moscow over the Ukraine war were “totally different.”
The US under then-US president Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the accord in 2018, setting off years of tensions and attacks across the Middle East.
“Getting out of the deal was one of the worst mistakes that’s been made in recent years. It let the entire Iranian nuclear program that we put in a box out of the box,” Blinken told CBS’ Face the Nation talk show.
“So if there’s a way of getting back to reimplementing that deal effectively, it’s in our interest to do it, and we’re working on that as we speak. It’s also in Russia’s interest,” Blinken said.
Meanwhile, the state-owned, English-language Tehran Times newspaper yesterday published an article suggesting that the draft nuclear deal in Vienna would allow Iran to “keep its advanced centrifuges and nuclear materials inside the country.”
The 2015 nuclear deal saw Iran put advanced centrifuges into storage under the watch of the International Atomic Energy Agency, while keeping its enrichment at 3.67 percent purity and its stockpile at only 300kg of uranium.
As of Feb. 19, Iran’s stockpile of all enriched uranium was nearly 3,200kg, the agency said.
Some has been enriched up to 60 percent purity — a short technical step from weapons-grade levels of 90 percent.
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