WASHINGTON, October 27. /TASS/. The United States is ready to return to the talks on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on the Iranian nuclear programs and thinks that an agreement on the return to the full compliance with the JCPOA can be reached quite soon, a US Department of State spokesperson told TASS on Wednesday, commenting on Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri’s statement that the six-party talks on the Iran nuclear deal would resume by late November.

"We have seen the reports but do not have any further details about a possible return to Vienna talks in November. <…> As we have said many times, we are prepared to return to Vienna, and we believe that it remains possible to quickly reach and implement an understanding on return to mutual full compliance with the JCPOA by closing the small number of issues that remained outstanding at the end of the sixth round of talks in June," the spokesperson said.

He expressed the hope that Iran would return to the talks in Vienna "to negotiate quickly and in good faith." "As we have also been clear, this window will not remain open forever as Iran continues to take provocative nuclear steps," he added.

The Joint Commission of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) has had several 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 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.