SOCHI, June 22. /TASS/. Washington and Tehran may be engaged in secret negotiations to strike a deal on renewing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) regarding Iran’s controversial nuclear program, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on Thursday.
"Whatever is done in the dark eventually comes to light, and this is obvious," Ryabkov said speaking to journalists.
"We have witnessed situations in the past when the United States and Iran held indirect contacts behind closed doors. It should be not excluded that similar contacts are taking place even now," the diplomat elaborated.
"The most important thing for us today is that the United States returns to full implementation of [UN Security Council] Resolution 2231," Ryabkov continued. "If a deal is inked now, but the JCPOA - as concluded in 2015 and approved by Resolution 2231 - is not renewed, this would mean that Washington would continue to be in gross violation of the resolution."
"We are already drawing conclusions from current developments," he added.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal, was signed by Iran, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (Russia, the United Kingdom, China, the United States and France) and Germany in 2015.
Under the deal, Iran pledged to curb its nuclear activities and place them under the total control of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in exchange for the rescinding of sanctions previously imposed by the UN Security Council, the European Union and the United States on Tehran’s nuclear program.
The future of the deal was called into question after the United States withdrew from it unilaterally in May 2018 under the Trump administration. Incumbent US President Joe Biden, however, has repeatedly signaled that Washington was ready to return to the nuclear deal but talks on the restoration of the agreement effectively ended in the spring of 2022 after relations between the US and Iran became strained.
Since April 2021, Russia, Britain, Germany, China, the United States and France have been in talks with Iran in Vienna in an effort to restore the JCPOA to its original form. On November 10, 2022, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said that another round of talks with Iranian representatives had ended in the Austrian capital without any result.