Speaking to reporters in a speech after his trip to Europe and West Asian region on Monday, the top US envoy on Iran Robert Malley said on Monday efforts to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal were now in a ‘critical phase’.
According to Reuters, Malley claimed Washington was increasingly worried Tehran would keep delaying a return to talks.
“We’re in a critical phase of the efforts to see whether we can revive the JCPOA,” Malley said. “We’ve had a hiatus of many months and the official reasons given by Iran for why we’re in this hiatus are wearing very thin.”
The US senior diplomat stressed that the United States would still be willing to engage in diplomacy with Iran.
Iran and the remaining signatories to the JCPOA known as the P4+1 have held six rounds of talks so far with no results. The Western powers made excessive demands during the talks and the talks were postponed at the end of the previous Iranian administration under Rouhani until the formation of the new government in Iran under President Ebrahim Raeisi.
The new Iranian administration has vowed that it will return to the Vienna talks if they are result-oriented and can yield tangible results for Iran in terms of the removal of the sanctions and abidance of the parties by the JCPOA provisions.
Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said on Saturday that the nuclear talks with P4+1 will resume soon.
In the latest development with regards to the talks, it was also announced earlier today that deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri Kani will hold a meeting with the EU's Enrique Mora in Brussels on Wednesday. Tehran has also said that the Brussels talks between Iran and the EU need to take place before the Vienna talks with P4+1.
Meanwhile, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said on October 5 that Iran will return to Vienna as soon as the internal review process is concluded with no preconditions.
Amid the indifference of the JCPOA parties to continued US violations of the JCPOA, Iran halted voluntary implementation of the Additional Protocol, which allows unannounced inspections of its nuclear sites by the IAEA inspectors as per a piece of legislation approved in the Iranian parliament last December.
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