MOSCOW, February 7. /TASS/. Russia’s Permanent Representative to the Vienna-based international organizations Mikhail Ulyanov has warned against reckless steps that can undermine the negotiating process on the restoration of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on the Iranian nuclear program.
"There is always a probability that someone may make reckless steps that would simply undermine the Vienna talks. Such a possibility cannot be ruled out completely," he said in an interview with the Kommersant daily. "But such a situation will speak about the utter irresponsibility of the one who ventures such steps. At the current advanced stage of the talks - a very advanced stage - it is absolutely inadmissible to create excessive tensions, to put a positive outcome at risk."
"We are five minutes from the finish. And we must master this final stretch quite quickly and effectively," he added.
The Joint Commission of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) has had seven offline meetings in Vienna since April to find ways to restore the nuclear deal in its original form. The sides discuss prospects for the United States’ possible return to the deal, steps needed to ensure full compliance with the deal’s terms by Iran, and issues of lifting the anti-Iranian sanctions.
The eighth round of talks kicked off on December 27, 2021. It is expected to be the last one as the negotiators are set to finish the work by early February.
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.