VIENNA, December 17. /TASS/. Participants in the Vienna talks on the restoration of the Iran nuclear deal have cleared the way for editing the existing documents, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the Vienna-based international organizations Mikhail Ulyanov told TASS, commenting on the results of the seventh round of talks.
"Now, the way is clear for intensive work on editing the documents that are on the negotiating table. This is the key result, I think," he stressed.
According to the Russian diplomat, participants in the talks have got somewhat used to each other. "I think we and the Western participants have begun to understand better which steps would be right to be made next," he added.
He said that the Russian delegation understood all the difficulties of the talks and the results of the seventh round have lived up to expectations. "The bottom line is that no one was seeking to damage the results of the previous six rounds," Ulyanov noted.
Following a lengthy tug-of-war, other participants in the talks, including European partners, have accepted quite a lot of the amendments to the document on nuclear issues suggested by the Iranian side. "Other participants in the talks demonstrated a respectful attitude to the new elements of Iran’s position. It was important, and we achieved it," he said.
The seventh round of talks on the restoration of the Iran nuclear deal finished in Vienna on Friday. The parties confirmed that further work will center around documents elaborated during the previous six rounds by June 2021. It was noted that the parties want to restore the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on the Iranian nuclear program in its original edition.
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.