ANKARA, June 27. /TASS/. Turkey doesn’t support the West’s anti-Iranian sanctions, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Monday after talks with his Iranian counterpart, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.
"We don’t support the anti-Iranian sanctions and don’t consider them right," he said, adding that he hopes that "the nuclear deal will be functioning."
"We also plan to exert more efforts to increase our trade. Moreover, we will continue cooperation to ensure protection [of the status of Jerusalem’s mosque] Al Aqsa and Palestine," he added.
The Iranian top diplomat, in turn, informed about the plans to hand over to Turkish officials "a draft of Iran’s proposals on a long-term comprehensive agreement between the two countries." "We have agreed to organize a meeting of a joint economic commission in thee near future," he said.
US Special Envoy for Iran Mr. Robert Malley said on May 25 that the probability of a failure of the talks with Tehran on the restoration of the Iran nuclear deal is now higher than the probability of success in this dialogue. On June 8, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said that Tehran had handed over to Washington a new package of proposals on the deal’s restoration.
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.
The United States’ current president, Joe Biden, has repeatedly signaled that Washington is ready to return to the nuclear deal. Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, China, the United States, and France have been negotiating with Iran possible restoration of the deal in its original format since April 2021.
However, on March 30, the US Department of the Treasury announced sanctions against one more Iranian individual and four legal entities. The sanctions were imposed on the basis of US laws on the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction.