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Tehran and Iran Six negotiators still have political will to reach agreement — Ryabkov

“It (the will) is definitely here. Everyone sees incoming external factors and the attention, which a number of countries pay to what is going on at the talks,” Ryabkov said

MOSCOW, January 19. /TASS/. All participants in Tehran’s talks with the P5+1 international negotiators to settle the controversial Iranian nuclear program still have the “political will” to settle the issue within the timeframe agreed upon last November,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on Monday.

“It (the will) is definitely here. Everyone sees incoming external factors and the attention, which a number of countries pay to what is going on at the talks,” Ryabkov said commenting on last week’s meeting of negotiators at the level of political directors in Geneva.

The P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France plus Germany) and Tehran have agreed to extend the deadline for an agreement in the talks on Iran’s nuclear program to June 30.

Iran says it needs nuclear power to generate electricity, but Western powers led by the United States claim Iran’s eventual aim is to create nuclear weapons.

The high-ranking Russian diplomat said, however, that “excessive attention to any type of negotiating process is rather disturbing.”

“Such factor forms a background of excessive responsibility for a wrong word or a poorly expressed stance,” he said. “There is always a danger in such situation that blunders or omissions of such nature will be not only used to the detriment of those who make them but to the negotiations on the whole.”

Talks between the P5+1 group’s (the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany) and Iran will be continued in early February, Wang Qun, the head of the Chinese delegation and director of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s Arms Control Department, said on Sunday. He added that the venue for the next round of talks would be announced later.