Raesi: Iran Complying with Leader’s Mandate in Nuclear Talks

“We have announced insistently and repeatedly that our strategy in the nuclear negotiations is the strategy declared by the Supreme Leader,” Raisi said in a meeting with a group of media managers in Tehran on Sunday evening.

Dismissing a series of attempts at claiming that the issue of nuclear negotiations is the only topic in Iran’s foreign policy agenda, the president said, “From the viewpoint of the administration, the nuclear negotiations are one of the issues of the country’s foreign policy, not the whole matter for the foreign policy.”

He also noted that the secretariat of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council is the only authority communicating with the media and informing them about the nuclear talks.

Last month, Ayatollah Khamenei underlined that Iran will not give up on its regional presence and peaceful nuclear program as two factors that contribute to the country’s national power.

The Vienna talks, meant to resurrect the JCPOA, were paused in March for an undetermined period of time despite reports suggesting that they were in the “final stages.”

The United States, which is blamed for the current stalemate, is reluctant to take confidence-building measures due to its erroneous bias, procrastination in decision-making and excessive demands.

Iranian officials have repeatedly said the US needs to remove all illegal sanctions against the Islamic Republic in a verifiable manner and offer guarantees that a new US administration will not breach the JCPOA again before it can rejoin the deal.

Former US president Donald Trump unilaterally left 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.