MOSCOW, December 24. /TASS/. Russia believes that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on the Iranian nuclear program is still topical and has no other alternatives, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Friday, commenting on US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s statements on alternatives to the JCPOA.

"This deal has not lost its topicality, and all UN Security Council member nations, including, by the way, the United States, must observe it. We insist on that," she said. "As for any possible alternatives to the restoration of the JCPOA, the Russian side insists that there is no alternative to the JCPOA."

According to Zakharova, Russia’s position has stayed unchanged from the very beginning of the work on the plan. "Correspondingly, when the United States began to break it down and withdraw from it unilaterally, saying they are special and that it why they quit it, we still insisted that this document had no alternatives," she said. "When Washington changed its position again, this time in favor of this agreement, we stuck to our former position and that is why we take part in these talks as real partners in order to restore this deal as soon as possible."

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (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 the total control of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in exchange for the 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 into question after the United States’ unilateral withdrawal in May 2018 and Washington’s unilateral oil export sanctions against Teheran. Iran argued that all the 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.

The seventh round of talks on the restoration of the Iran nuclear deal finished in Vienna on December 17. It was noted that the parties want to restore the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on the Iranian nuclear program in its original edition.