TEHRAN, February 9. /TASS/. Tehran will continue consultations with Russia on having Western sanctions against the Islamic Republic lifted as part of a nuclear deal, Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian said during Tuesday’s phone conversation with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov.

"The Iranian foreign minister stressed that the effective lifting of sanctions is a very important issue and Iran will continue its consultations and contacts with Moscow and other parties in this regard," the Iranian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

According to the ministry, "Iran is ready to reach such an agreement as soon as possible, but <…> without realism and tangible and real actions by the West, progress in the negotiations will not be accelerated."

The eighth round of talks kicked off on December 27, 2021. 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.