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Negotiators on Iran nuclear deal plan to intensify work of draft agreement - diplomat

The Joint Commission of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has had seven offline meetings in Vienna since April to find ways to restore the nuclear deal in its original form

VIENNA, December 27. /TASS/. Participants in the eighth round of the Vienna talks on the restoration of the Iran nuclear deal have agreed to intensify the process of drafting documents in order to reach a final agreement as soon as possible, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the Vienna-based international organizations Mikhail Ulyanov, who heads the Russian delegation to the talks, said on Monday.

"At the meeting of the Joint Commission today the 8th round of the ViennaTalks was declared open. The participants held businesslike and result-oriented discussions. In particular they agreed to intensify the drafting process in order to achieve an agreement ASAP," he wrote on his Twitter account.

The Joint Commission of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) has had seven 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 seventh round of talks on the restoration of the Iran nuclear deal finished in Vienna on December 17. 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 eighth round of talks kicked off on Monday. It is expected to be the last one as the negotiators are set to finish the work by early February.

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.

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