Iran says Western parties to 2015 deal became realistic, backed down from ‘maximalist demands’
The spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry says the western parties to the 2015 deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), have realized that they have to back down from their “maximalist demands” during the ongoing negotiations in the Austrian capital of Vienna.
“If we have a common text today, that’s because the Western side realized that it must back down from its maximalist demands, and what we have today (the text) is a result of the Western parties’ realization in the Vienna talks that they cannot demand anything beyond the JCPOA on the nuclear issue and implement less commitments to lifting sanctions than those stipulated under the JCPOA,” Saeed Khatibzadeh said at a news conference on Monday.
He noted that bilateral and multilateral talks would begin in Vienna later in the day.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Khatibzadeh noted that Iran and the US exchange their views via indirect, written texts in order to avoid any misunderstanding and misinterpretation.
Khatibzadeh stated that progress has been made in four areas of the talks, namely lifting of sanctions, nuclear issues, the guarantees, and the verification.
He noted that the level of progress made in the four areas varies.
Former US president Donald Trump nixed the JCPOA in May 2018 and re-imposed the anti-Iran sanctions that the deal had lifted.
He also placed additional sanctions on Iran under other pretexts not related to the nuclear case as part of his “maximum pressure” campaign.
Following a year of strategic patience, Iran resorted to its legal rights stipulated in Article 26 of the JCPOA, which grants a party the right to suspend its contractual commitments in case of non-compliance by other signatories and let go of some of the restrictions imposed on its nuclear energy program.
Iran and the five remaining signatories to the JCPOA 27 kicked off the eighth round of talks on December 27, focusing on the removal of all sanctions imposed on Tehran after Washington’s unilateral withdrawal from the agreement. The previous round, the first under Iran’s new President Ebrahim Raeisi, ended on December 17.
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