VIENNA, April 16. /TASS/. The Joint Commission of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on the Iranian nuclear program will continue consultations in Vienna on Saturday on the restoration of the Iran nuclear deal, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the Vienna-based international organizations Mikhai, Ulyanov said on Friday.
"The work on restoration of the nuclear deal will continue in Vienna tomorrow under the auspices of the Joint Commission of JCPOA," he wrote on his Twitter account.
According to the Russian diplomat, a trilateral meeting of the heads of the Iranian, Chinese and Russian delegations was held on Friday evening in the context of the upcoming talks.
On Thursday, the JCPOA Joint Commission discussed prospects for the United States’ possible return to the deal and ways of ensuring full and efficient implementation of the Iran nuclear deal by the all the parties to it. Informal discussions were continued on Friday in various formats, including at an expert level.
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.