Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Ali Shamkhani said that talks between Tehran and the world powers in Vienna have made limited progress but an agreement is not in sight as long as undertakings of parties are not in balance.
“Despite limited progress in the Vienna Talks, we are still far from achieving the necessary balance in the commitments of the parties,” Shamkhani wrote on his twitter page on Sunday.
“Political decisions in Washington are required for balance of commitments to reach a good agreement,” he added.
Late in November last year, the participants in the Vienna talks aimed to remove sanctions against Tehran and revive Iran’s deal with world powers, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), resumed the Vienna talks for the first time under Iran’s new president Ebrahim Rayeesi. Since then, Iran has repeatedly emphasized that it seeks a “good agreement” in the Austrian capital.
The talks were launched last April over US President Joe Biden’s pledge to rejoin the JCPOA and rescind Trump’s “failed maximum pressure” campaign.
Over a year into his presidency, Biden has failed to re-enter the 2015 deal. Instead, he has kept Trump’s sanctions in place while adding new ones as well.
The US quit the deal in 2018 and returned the sanctions that the accord had lifted. Now, the talks are examining the potential of fresh removal of the sanctions.
Reports said on Friday that the Biden administration has restored a nuclear cooperation sanctions waiver to Iran, a senior State Department official said.
The waiver, which was rescinded by the Trump administration in May 2020, had allowed Russian, Chinese and European companies to carry out non-proliferation work at Iranian nuclear sites.
The move came as Iran has been requesting removal of economic sanctions.
Shamkhani reacted to the news on Saturday by saying that Iran has the right to a peaceful nuclear program.
“Iran’s legal right to continue research and development and to maintain its peaceful nuclear capabilities and achievements, along with its security against supported evils, cannot be restricted by any agreement,” he tweeted.
Iranian senior analyst Seyed Mostafa Khoshcheshm also discredited the US move, describing it as a deceitful measure aimed at prioritizing nuclear debates over economic sanctions in the Vienna talks.
In a reply tweet to a post left by the Russian representative at the Vienna negotiations, Mikhail Ulyanov who had welcomed the US waivers as a step forward, Khoshcheshm said the US continues its game against Iran and its recent move shouldn’t be interpreted as softening tone.
Iranian Government Spokesman Ali Bahadori Jahromi said earlier this week that his country does not accept lifting of the US embargos just on paper and all of them should be removed in practice.
Sanctions are not going to be removed just on paper, because, such issue happened in the previous administration of the country in a way that the then governor of Central Bank of Iran (CBI) had acknowledged that “almost nothing” had been gained as a result of the negotiation of the former administration of the country under President Rouhani, Bahadori Jahromi said.
