VIENNA, May 19./TASS/. Participants in the meetings of the Joint Commission of Iran and five world powers (Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, China and France) work on the premise that the US will return to the JCPOA’s implementation, Russian Permanent Representative to International Organizations in Vienna Mikhail Ulyanov, said on Wednesday after a meeting of the Joint Commission of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action aimed to revive the Iran nuclear deal.

"Everybody goes on the premise that the US will return to the deal. It is clear that the Americans must fulfill the main part of the agreements that are being worked out now," Ulyanov told journalists.

The participants in the talks that have been held in person in Vienna since early April note stable progress in work. Experts in three working groups are hammering out the text of a future agreement to return to the compliance with the JCPOA: lifting of Washington’s sanctions from Iran (and the future return of the US to the JCPOA) and Iran’s compliance with the nuclear commitments. All delegations are keen to make efforts to complete the talks by the end of May.

Representatives from the states parties to the JCPOA are also holding separate consultations with the delegation of the US, which withdraw from the JCPOA in 2018, but is now signaling intentions to return. No direct negotiations of American emissaries with Iran’s representatives are conducted in Vienna.

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.