MOSCOW, July 21. /TASS/. Moscow and Teheran are sparing no effort to support the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on the Iranian nuclear program and believe that the chances to save the nuclear deal are still in place, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday at the beginning of talks with his visiting Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif.

"We are convinced that chances to get the JCPOA back on sustainable track are still in place. At least, we and our Iranian friends are sparing no effort for that. We see that China sticks to the same positions and the European signatories to the JCPOA continue to show interest in that," he noted.

The Russian foreign minister stressed that his talks with the Iranian counterpart was a major part of joint efforts of the deal’s participants to keep it in place. He added he would like to discuss with Zarif "additional steps, first of all in the legal sphere, that need to be taken on the basis of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2231, which is part and parcel of the JCPOA." Russia, according to Lavrov, thinks that the United States is pursuing a destructive policy aimed at complete breakdown of both the JCPOA and other agreements in the area of arms control and nonproliferation.

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.

On July 20, 2015, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 2231 in support of the JCPOA. The resolution that was adopted unanimously provides for a five-year weapons embargo against Iran.

The future of the deal was called in question after the United States’ unilateral pullout on May 8, 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.