MOSCOW, April 17. /TASS/. The joint commission on Iran’s nuclear program will hold an official meeting in Vienna on April 17 amid progress achieved in rejoining the deal, Russia’s Permanent Representative at International Organizations in Vienna Mikhail Ulyanov announced on Saturday.
"We note progress at the talks on resuming the nuclear deal. The progress is slow but steady. The negotiations are gradually becoming profound. That is why, it has been decided to hold today an official meeting of the Joint Commission of the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] in addition to the planned meetings of expert groups," the Russian envoy wrote on his Twitter.
As the Russian diplomat said on his Twitter on April 16, a trilateral meeting of the heads of the Iranian, Chinese and Russian delegations was held on Friday evening in the context of the ongoing talks. He added that the participants of the joint commission of Iran and the JCPOA’s other five states (Russia, China, Germany, Britain and France) would continue consultations in Vienna on Saturday on restoring the Iran nuclear deal.
On Thursday, the JCPOA Joint Commission discussed prospects for the United States’ possible return to the deal and ways of ensuring full and efficient implementation of the Iran nuclear deal by the all the parties to it. Informal discussions were continued on Friday in various formats, including at an expert level.
The JCPOA, also known as the Iran nuclear deal, was signed between Iran, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (Russia, the United Kingdom, China, the United States and France) and Germany in 2015. Under the deal, Iran undertook to curb its nuclear activities and place them under total control of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in exchange of abandonment of the sanctions imposed previously by the United Nations Security Council, the European Union and the United States over its nuclear program.
The future of the deal was called in question after the United States’ unilateral pullout in May, 2018 and Washington’s unilateral oil export sanctions against Teheran. Iran argued that all other participants, Europeans in the first place, were ignoring some of their own obligations in the economic sphere, thus making the deal in its current shape senseless. This said, it began to gradually scale down its commitments under the deal.